Related papers: A compact, hierarchical Q-function decomposition
People often plan hierarchically. That is, rather than planning over a monolithic representation of a task, they decompose the task into simpler subtasks and then plan to accomplish those. Although much work explores how people decompose…
Medical treatments often involve a sequence of decisions, each informed by previous outcomes. This process closely aligns with reinforcement learning (RL), a framework for optimizing sequential decisions to maximize cumulative rewards under…
Direct load control of a heterogeneous cluster of residential demand flexibility sources is a high-dimensional control problem with partial observability. This work proposes a novel approach that uses a convolutional neural network to…
As Test-Time Scaling emerges as an active research focus in the large language model community, advanced post-training methods increasingly emphasize extending chain-of-thought (CoT) generation length, thereby enhancing reasoning…
Many large MDPs can be represented compactly using a dynamic Bayesian network. Although the structure of the value function does not retain the structure of the process, recent work has shown that value functions in factored MDPs can often…
A task decomposition method for iterative learning model predictive control is presented. We consider a constrained nonlinear dynamical system and assume the availability of state-input pair datasets which solve a task T1. Our objective is…
An agent's ability to leverage past experience is critical for efficiently solving new tasks. Prior work has focused on using value function estimates to obtain zero-shot approximations for solutions to a new task. In soft Q-learning, we…
Reinforcement learning is a popular method of finding optimal solutions to complex problems. Algorithms like Q-learning excel at learning to solve stochastic problems without a model of their environment. However, they take longer to solve…
Many practical applications of reinforcement learning require agents to learn from sparse and delayed rewards. It challenges the ability of agents to attribute their actions to future outcomes. In this paper, we consider the problem…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise as a means to learn high-reward policies from a static dataset, without the need for further environment interactions. However, a key challenge in offline RL lies in effectively stitching…
Transfer in Reinforcement Learning aims to improve learning performance on target tasks using knowledge from experienced source tasks. Successor Representations (SR) and their extension Successor Features (SF) are prominent transfer…
Discrete-action reinforcement learning algorithms often falter in tasks with high-dimensional discrete action spaces due to the vast number of possible actions. A recent advancement leverages value-decomposition, a concept from multi-agent…
Value decomposition is widely used in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, however, its implicit credit assignment mechanism is not yet fully understood due to black-box networks. In this work, we study an interpretable value…
Off-policy reinforcement learning suffers from extrapolation errors when a learned policy selects actions that are weakly supported in the replay buffer. In this study, we address this issue by drawing an analogy to static friction. From…
Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…
Value-based algorithms are a cornerstone of off-policy reinforcement learning due to their simplicity and training stability. However, their use has traditionally been restricted to discrete action spaces, as they rely on estimating…
We propose $\textit{iterative inversion}$ -- an algorithm for learning an inverse function without input-output pairs, but only with samples from the desired output distribution and access to the forward function. The key challenge is a…
Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…
Shapley values have become one of the go-to methods to explain complex models to end-users. They provide a model agnostic post-hoc explanation with foundations in game theory: what is the worth of a player (in machine learning, a feature…
We propose Q-Policy, a hybrid quantum-classical reinforcement learning (RL) framework that mathematically accelerates policy evaluation and optimization by exploiting quantum computing primitives. Q-Policy encodes value functions in quantum…