Related papers: Dynamic Subgoal-based Exploration via Bayesian Opt…
Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…
Most real optimization problems are defined over a mixed search space where the variables are both discrete and continuous. In engineering applications, the objective function is typically calculated with a numerically costly black-box…
Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…
Bayesian meta-learning enables robust and fast adaptation to new tasks with uncertainty assessment. The key idea behind Bayesian meta-learning is empirical Bayes inference of hierarchical model. In this work, we extend this framework to…
Finding the best strategy to minimize the time needed to find a given target is a crucial task both in nature and in reaching decisive technological advances. By considering learning agents able to switch their dynamics between standard and…
In the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, the learning is guided through a reward signal. This means that in situations of sparse rewards the agent has to focus on exploration, in order to discover which action, or set of actions leads…
Bayesian optimisation is a popular method for efficient optimisation of expensive black-box functions. Traditionally, BO assumes that the search space is known. However, in many problems, this assumption does not hold. To this end, we…
With the growing needs of online A/B testing to support the innovation in industry, the opportunity cost of running an experiment becomes non-negligible. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for an efficient continuous monitoring…
In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…
Typical models of learning assume incremental estimation of continuously-varying decision variables like expected rewards. However, this class of models fails to capture more idiosyncratic, discrete heuristics and strategies that people and…
Bayesian optimal experiments that maximize the information gained from collected data are critical to efficiently identify behavioral models. We extend a seminal method for designing Bayesian optimal experiments by introducing two…
Reinforcement learning provides a framework for learning to control which actions to take towards completing a task through trial-and-error. In many applications observing interactions is costly, necessitating sample-efficient learning. In…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…
The notion of expense in Bayesian optimisation generally refers to the uniformly expensive cost of function evaluations over the whole search space. However, in some scenarios, the cost of evaluation for black-box objective functions is…
In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…
While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from…
In this paper we develop a dynamic form of Bayesian optimization for machine learning models with the goal of rapidly finding good hyperparameter settings. Our method uses the partial information gained during the training of a machine…
Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (GCHRL) provides a promising approach to solving long-horizon tasks. Recently, its success has been extended to more general settings by concurrently learning hierarchical policies and…
Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…
Integration of reinforcement learning with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to achieve autonomous flight has been an active research area in recent years. An important part focuses on obstacle detection and avoidance for UAVs navigating…