Related papers: The Value Equivalence Principle for Model-Based Re…

As more machine learning agents interact with humans, it is increasingly a prospect that an agent trained to perform a task optimally, using only a measure of task performance as feedback, can violate societal norms for acceptable behavior…

Action-values play a central role in popular Reinforcement Learing (RL) models of behavior. Yet, the idea that action-values are explicitly represented has been extensively debated. Critics had therefore repeatedly suggested that…

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model…

Agent-based Models (ABMs) are valuable tools for policy analysis. ABMs help analysts explore the emergent consequences of policy interventions in multi-agent decision-making settings. But the validity of inferences drawn from ABM…

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

A key question in reinforcement learning is how an intelligent agent can generalize knowledge across different inputs. By generalizing across different inputs, information learned for one input can be immediately reused for improving…

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

We investigate a paradigm in multi-task reinforcement learning (MT-RL) in which an agent is placed in an environment and needs to learn to perform a series of tasks, within this space. Since the environment does not change, there is…

Many model-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods follow a similar template: fit a model to previously observed data, and then use data from that model for RL or planning. However, models that achieve better training performance (e.g.,…

Innate values describe agents' intrinsic motivations, which reflect their inherent interests and preferences for pursuing goals and drive them to develop diverse skills that satisfy their various needs. Traditional reinforcement learning…

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…

When function approximation is deployed in reinforcement learning (RL), the same problem may be formulated in different ways, often by treating a pre-processing step as a part of the environment or as part of the agent. As a consequence,…

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

The interaction between an artificial agent and its environment is bi-directional. The agent extracts relevant information from the environment, and affects the environment by its actions in return to accumulate high expected reward.…

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

A promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning is model-based methods, in which many explorations and evaluations can happen in the learned models to save real-world samples. However, when the learned model has a…

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms designed for handling complex visual observations typically learn some sort of latent state representation, either explicitly or implicitly. Standard methods of this sort do not distinguish…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Empowerment is an information-theoretic method that can be used to intrinsically motivate learning agents. It attempts to maximize an agent's control over the environment by encouraging visiting states with a large number of reachable next…

Successor-style representations have many advantages for reinforcement learning: for example, they can help an agent generalize from past experience to new goals, and they have been proposed as explanations of behavioral and neural data…