Related papers: When Waiting is not an Option : Learning Options w…
An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…
Hard optimisation problems such as Boolean Satisfiability typically have long solving times and can usually be solved by many algorithms, although the performance can vary widely in practice. Research has shown that no single algorithm…
Maximizing long-term rewards is the primary goal in sequential decision-making problems. The majority of existing methods assume that side information is freely available, enabling the learning agent to observe all features' states before…
Algorithm design is a laborious process and often requires many iterations of ideation and validation. In this paper, we explore automating algorithm design and present a method to learn an optimization algorithm, which we believe to be the…
Abstraction is key to scaling up reinforcement learning (RL). However, autonomously learning abstract state and action representations to enable transfer and generalization remains a challenging open problem. This paper presents a novel…
We consider sequential decision problems in which we adaptively choose one of finitely many alternatives and observe a stochastic reward. We offer a new perspective of interpreting Bayesian ranking and selection problems as adaptive…
We propose a novel planning technique for satisfying tasks specified in temporal logic in partially revealed environments. We define high-level actions derived from the environment and the given task itself, and estimate how each action…
Decision-making AI agents are often faced with two important challenges: the depth of the planning horizon, and the branching factor due to having many choices. Hierarchical reinforcement learning methods aim to solve the first problem, by…
This paper focuses on managing the cost of deliberation before action. In many problems, the overall quality of the solution reflects costs incurred and resources consumed in deliberation as well as the cost and benefit of execution, when…
In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…
To achieve the ambitious goals of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning must include planning with a model of the world that is abstract in state and time. Deep learning has made progress with state abstraction, but temporal…
Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…
Active learning strategies respond to the costly labelling task in a supervised classification by selecting the most useful unlabelled examples in training a predictive model. Many conventional active learning algorithms focus on refining…
Temporal abstraction allows reinforcement learning agents to represent knowledge and develop strategies over different temporal scales. The option-critic framework has been demonstrated to learn temporally extended actions, represented as…
It is widely acknowledged that transparency of automated decision making is crucial for deployability of intelligent systems, and explaining the reasons why some decisions are "good" and some are not is a way to achieving this transparency.…
American options are studied in a general discrete market in the presence of proportional transaction costs, modelled as bid-ask spreads. Pricing algorithms and constructions of hedging strategies, stopping times and martingale…
Hierarchical abstractions, also known as options -- a type of temporally extended action (Sutton et. al. 1999) that enables a reinforcement learning agent to plan at a higher level, abstracting away from the lower-level details. In this…
Most methods for decision-theoretic online learning are based on the Hedge algorithm, which takes a parameter called the learning rate. In most previous analyses the learning rate was carefully tuned to obtain optimal worst-case…
We develop a full-fledged analysis of an algorithmic decision process that, in a multialternative choice problem, produces computable choice probabilities and expected decision times.
Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…