Related papers: Guided Policy Search with Delayed Sensor Measureme…
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,…
Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning…
Recent machine-learning approaches to deterministic search and domain-independent planning employ policy learning to speed up search. Unfortunately, when attempting to solve a search problem by successively applying a policy, no guarantees…
We propose a method to optimise the parameters of a policy which will be used to safely perform a given task in a data-efficient manner. We train a Gaussian process model to capture the system dynamics, based on the PILCO framework. Our…
Batch reinforcement learning enables policy learning without direct interaction with the environment during training, relying exclusively on previously collected sets of interactions. This approach is, therefore, well-suited for high-risk…
Robotic learning for navigation in unfamiliar environments needs to provide policies for both task-oriented navigation (i.e., reaching a goal that the robot has located), and task-agnostic exploration (i.e., searching for a goal in a novel…
Multi-objective Markov decision processes are sequential decision-making problems that involve multiple conflicting reward functions that cannot be optimized simultaneously without a compromise. This type of problems cannot be solved by a…
Policy tree search is a family of tree search algorithms that use a policy to guide the search. These algorithms provide guarantees on the number of expansions required to solve a given problem that are based on the quality of the policy.…
We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
This paper introduces a new approach to solve sensor management problems. Classically sensor management problems can be well formalized as Partially-Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMPD). The original approach developped here consists…
This paper presents a reinforcement learning approach to synthesizing task-driven control policies for robotic systems equipped with rich sensory modalities (e.g., vision or depth). Standard reinforcement learning algorithms typically…
We present differentiable predictive control (DPC), a method for learning constrained neural control policies for linear systems with probabilistic performance guarantees. We employ automatic differentiation to obtain direct policy…
Lengthy evaluation times are common in many optimization problems such as direct policy search tasks, especially when they involve conducting evaluations in the physical world, e.g. in robotics applications. Often when evaluating solution…
Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…
We propose a general framework for sequential and dynamic acquisition of useful information in order to solve a particular task. While our goal could in principle be tackled by general reinforcement learning, our particular setting is…
Filtering is concerned with the sequential estimation of the state, and uncertainties, of a Markovian system, given noisy observations. It is particularly difficult to achieve accurate filtering in complex dynamical systems, such as those…
We study the problem of learning a navigation policy for a robot to actively search for an object of interest in an indoor environment solely from its visual inputs. While scene-driven visual navigation has been widely studied, prior…
The performance of learning-based control techniques crucially depends on how effectively the system is explored. While most exploration techniques aim to achieve a globally accurate model, such approaches are generally unsuited for systems…
Covert planning refers to a class of constrained planning problems where an agent aims to accomplish a task with minimal information leaked to a passive observer to avoid detection. However, existing methods of covert planning often…