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Related papers: Variational Intrinsic Control Revisited

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Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-27 Aurya S. Javeed , Drew P. Kouri , Thomas M. Surowiec

We propose a novel approach to solving input- and state-constrained parametric mixed-integer optimal control problems using Differentiable Predictive Control (DPC). Our approach follows the differentiable programming paradigm by learning an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-25 Ján Boldocký , Shahriar Dadras Javan , Martin Gulan , Martin Mönnigmann , Ján Drgoňa

How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Diederik P Kingma , Max Welling

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) actively elicit user preferences to generate adaptive recommendations. Mainstream reinforcement learning-based CRS solutions heavily rely on handcrafted reward functions, which may not be aligned…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Zhendong Chu , Nan Wang , Hongning Wang

We study the inverse optimal control problem in social sciences: we aim at learning a user's true cost function from the observed temporal behavior. In contrast to traditional phenomenological works that aim to learn a generative model to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Yichen Wang , Le Song , Hongyuan Zha

We investigate an optimal control problem motivated by neuroscience, where the dynamics is driven by a Poisson process with a controlled stochastic intensity and an unknown parameter. Given a prior distribution for the unknown parameter, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Nicolas Baradel , Quentin Cormier

Control of non-episodic, finite-horizon dynamical systems with uncertain dynamics poses a tough and elementary case of the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Bayesian reinforcement learning, reasoning about the effect of actions and future…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-08-12 Edgar D. Klenske , Philipp Hennig

We present a data-driven optimal control framework that can be viewed as a generalization of the path integral (PI) control approach. We find iterative feedback control laws without parameterization based on probabilistic representation of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-02-02 Yunpeng Pan , Evangelos A. Theodorou , Michail Kontitsis

In this paper we are introducing a new reinforcement learning method for control problems in environments with delayed feedback. Specifically, our method employs stochastic planning, versus previous methods that used deterministic planning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Zhiyuan Yao , Ionut Florescu , Chihoon Lee

We investigate the complexities of the McKean-Vlasov optimal control problem, exploring its various formulations such as the strong and weak formulations, as well as both Markovian and non-Markovian setups within financial markets.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-29 Timothy Bennett

We consider an optimal stochastic impulse control problem over an infinite time horizon motivated by a model of irreversible investment choices with fixed adjustment costs. By employing techniques of viscosity solutions and relying on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-05 Salvatore Federico , Mauro Rosestolato , Elisa Tacconi

Variational continual learning (VCL) is a turn-key learning algorithm that has state-of-the-art performance among the best continual learning models. In our work, we explore an extension of the generalized variational continual learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Fan Yang

This paper deals with the computation of the largest robust control invariant sets (RCISs) of constrained nonlinear systems. The proposed approach is based on casting the search for the invariant set as a graph theoretical problem.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-02-16 Benjamin Decardi-Nelson , Jinfeng Liu

In the realm of multi-agent reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivations have emerged as a pivotal tool for exploration. While the computation of many intrinsic rewards relies on estimating variational posteriors using neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Chenghao Li , Tonghan Wang , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Nikola Vulin , Sammy Christen , Stefan Stevsic , Otmar Hilliges

Environments with controllable dynamics are usually understood in terms of explicit models. However, such models are not always available, but may sometimes be learned by exploring an environment. In this work, we investigate using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Peter N. Loxley , Friedrich T. Sommer

Deep model-based reinforcement learning methods offer a conceptually simple approach to the decision-making and control problem: use learning for the purpose of estimating an approximate dynamics model, and offload the rest of the work to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Michael Janner

Bayesian Inference and Information Bottleneck are the two most popular objectives for neural networks, but they can be optimised only via a variational lower bound: the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB). In this manuscript we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Vincenzo Crescimanna , Bruce Graham

In order to provide adaptive and user-friendly solutions to robotic manipulation, it is important that the agent can learn to accomplish tasks even if they are only provided with very sparse instruction signals. To address the issues…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Siyu Dai , Wei Xu , Andreas Hofmann , Brian Williams