Related papers: Posterior Coreset Construction with Kernelized Ste…
We consider the regret minimization problem in reinforcement learning (RL) in the episodic setting. In many real-world RL environments, the state and action spaces are continuous or very large. Existing approaches establish regret…
A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an…
Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) model scenarios of sequential decision making with multiple objectives that are increasingly important in many applications. However, the model is often unknown and must be learned online while…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) allows data-efficient learning which is required in real world applications such as robotics. However, despite the impressive data-efficiency, MBRL does not achieve the final performance of…
Kernel methods are one of the mainstays of machine learning, but the problem of kernel learning remains challenging, with only a few heuristics and very little theory. This is of particular importance in methods based on estimation of…
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a promising route to sample-efficient policy optimization. However, a known vulnerability of reconstruction-based MBRL consists of scenarios in which detailed aspects of the world are highly…
We analyze the Bayesian regret of the Gaussian process posterior sampling reinforcement learning (GP-PSRL) algorithm. Posterior sampling is an effective heuristic for decision-making under uncertainty that has been used to develop…
Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…
In this work, we propose KeRNS: an algorithm for episodic reinforcement learning in non-stationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose state-action set is endowed with a metric. Using a non-parametric model of the MDP built with…
The intrinsic high dimension of fluid dynamics is an inherent challenge to control of aerodynamic flows, and this is further complicated by a flow's nonlinear response to strong disturbances. Deep reinforcement learning, which takes…
Symmetry is pervasive in robotics and has been widely exploited to improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). However, existing approaches primarily focus on spatial symmetries, such as reflection, rotation, and…
Effective planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) and model-predictive control (MPC) relies on the accuracy of the learned dynamics model. In many instances of MBRL and MPC, this model is assumed to be stationary and is…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for robot learning. However, model-free RL (MFRL) requires a large number of environment interactions to learn successful control policies. This is due to the noisy RL training updates and…
Building on the framework introduced by Xu and Raginksy [1] for supervised learning problems, we study the best achievable performance for model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning problems. With this purpose, we define minimum Bayesian…
Approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) offers the promise of more rapid sampling at the cost of more biased inference. Since standard MCMC diagnostics fail to detect these biases, researchers have developed computable Stein discrepancy…
Training neural networks with reinforcement learning (RL) typically relies on backpropagation (BP), necessitating storage of activations from the forward pass for subsequent backward updates. Furthermore, backpropagating error signals…
Fine-tuning pre-trained robot policies with reinforcement learning (RL) often inherits the bottlenecks introduced by pre-training with behavioral cloning (BC), which produces narrow action distributions that lack the coverage necessary for…
Deep learning based image reconstruction methods outperform traditional methods. However, neural networks suffer from a performance drop when applied to images from a different distribution than the training images. For example, a model…
We study task selection to enhance sample efficiency in model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning (MAML-RL). Traditional meta-RL typically assumes that all available tasks are equally important, which can lead to task redundancy when they…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…