Related papers: Learning Successor States and Goal-Dependent Value…
In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…
Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD($\lambda$), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction…
In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…
The value function plays a crucial role as a measure for the cumulative future reward an agent receives in both reinforcement learning and optimal control. It is therefore of interest to study how similar the values of neighboring states…
Continual learning aims to sequentially learn new tasks without forgetting previous tasks' knowledge (catastrophic forgetting). One factor that can cause forgetting is the interference between the gradients on losses from different tasks.…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…
In reinforcement learning, the performance of learning agents is highly sensitive to the choice of time discretization. Agents acting at high frequencies have the best control opportunities, along with some drawbacks, such as possible…
We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning model for discrete environments, which is inherently interpretable and supports the discovery of deep subgoal hierarchies. In the model, an agent learns information about environment in the form of…
In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…
Differential temporal difference (TD) methods are value-based reinforcement learning algorithms that have been proposed for infinite-horizon problems. They rely on reward centering, where each reward is centered by the average reward. This…
Domain-specific features are important in representing problem structure throughout machine learning and decision-theoretic planning. In planning, once state features are provided, domain-independent algorithms such as approximate value…
This paper contributes a new approach for distributional reinforcement learning which elucidates a clean separation of transition structure and reward in the learning process. Analogous to how the successor representation (SR) describes the…
The policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000) prescribes the usage of a cumulative discounted state distribution under the target policy to approximate the gradient. Most algorithms based on this theorem, in practice, break this…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…
Appropriate credit assignment for delay rewards is a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning. To tackle this problem, we introduce a delay reward calibration paradigm inspired from a classification perspective. We hypothesize that…
The quintessential model-based reinforcement-learning agent iteratively refines its estimates or prior beliefs about the true underlying model of the environment. Recent empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning with…
Model-free algorithms are brought into the control system's research with the emergence of reinforcement learning algorithms. However, there are two practical challenges of reinforcement learning-based methods. First, learning by…
The ability of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to learn about many reward functions at the same time has many potential benefits, such as the decomposition of complex tasks into simpler ones, the exchange of information between tasks,…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning can improve generalization by decomposing long-horizon decision-making into simpler subproblems. However, existing approaches often rely on restrictive design choices, such as fixed temporal abstractions…
Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…