Related papers: Linear combination of one-step predictive informat…

Information theory is a powerful tool to express principles to drive autonomous systems because it is domain invariant and allows for an intuitive interpretation. This paper studies the use of the predictive information (PI), also called…

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is environment generalization: a policy trained to solve a task in one environment often fails to solve the same task in a slightly different test environment. A common approach to improve…

We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…

We propose the conditional predictive impact (CPI), a consistent and unbiased estimator of the association between one or several features and a given outcome, conditional on a reduced feature set. Building on the knockoff framework of…

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Active recognition enables robots to intelligently explore novel observations, thereby acquiring more information while circumventing undesired viewing conditions. Recent approaches favor learning policies from simulated or collected data,…

When deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need effective ways of communicating objectives to them. Traditional skill learning has revolved around reinforcement and imitation learning, each with rigid constraints on the format…

We explore the probabilistic foundations of shared control in complex dynamic environments. In order to do this, we formulate shared control as a random process and describe the joint distribution that governs its behavior. For…

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Autonomous robots operating in open and changing environments cannot always rely on predefined inputs, outputs, and action routines. Although existing learning methods enable robots to improve their performance through environmental…

Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…

Information-theoretic approaches to active learning have traditionally focused on maximising the information gathered about the model parameters, most commonly by optimising the BALD score. We highlight that this can be suboptimal from the…

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Effective exploration is critical for reinforcement learning agents in environments with sparse rewards or high-dimensional state-action spaces. Recent works based on state-visitation counts, curiosity and entropy-maximization generate…

Future sequence represents the outcome after executing the action into the environment (i.e. the trajectory onwards). When driven by the information-theoretic concept of mutual information, it seeks maximally informative consequences.…

Deep Reinforcement Learning has enabled the control of increasingly complex and high-dimensional problems. However, the need of vast amounts of data before reasonable performance is attained prevents its widespread application. We employ…

The activity patterns of highly developed cognitive systems like the human brain are dominated by autonomous dynamical processes, that is by a self-sustained activity which would be present even in the absence of external sensory stimuli.…

We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…