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Understanding climate dynamics requires going beyond correlations in observational data to uncover their underlying causal process. Latent drivers, such as atmospheric processes, play a critical role in temporal dynamics, while direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Minghao Fu , Biwei Huang , Zijian Li , Yujia Zheng , Ignavier Ng , Guangyi Chen , Yingyao Hu , Kun Zhang

Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (CRL) provides a promising framework for extracting useful structured representations from unlabeled interactions. By pulling together state-action pairs and their corresponding future states, while…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Arsh Tangri , Nichols Crawford Taylor , Haojie Huang , Robert Platt

Causal dynamics learning has recently emerged as a promising approach to enhancing robustness in reinforcement learning (RL). Typically, the goal is to build a dynamics model that makes predictions based on the causal relationships among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Inwoo Hwang , Yunhyeok Kwak , Suhyung Choi , Byoung-Tak Zhang , Sanghack Lee

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is believed to have much higher sample efficiency compared to model-free algorithms by learning a predictive model of the environment. However, the performance of MBRL highly relies on the quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Xin-Yang Liu , Jian-Xun Wang

This paper explores the impact of relational state abstraction on sample efficiency and performance in collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. The proposed abstraction is based on spatial relationships in environments where direct…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Sharlin Utke , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

While the difficulty of reinforcement learning problems is typically related to the complexity of their state spaces, Abstraction proposes that solutions often lie in simpler underlying latent spaces. Prior works have focused on learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Amnon Attali , Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Marco Morales , Nancy M. Amato

Designing effective task sequences is crucial for curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL), where agents must gradually acquire skills by training on intermediate tasks. A key challenge in CRL is to identify tasks that promote exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Geonwoo Cho , Jaegyun Im , Doyoon Kim , Sundong Kim

Abstraction is crucial for effective sequential decision making in domains with large state spaces. In this work, we propose an information bottleneck method for learning approximate bisimulations, a type of state abstraction. We use a deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-12 Ondrej Biza , Robert Platt , Jan-Willem van de Meent , Lawson L. S. Wong

State abstraction has been an essential tool for dramatically improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement-learning algorithms. Indeed, by exposing and accentuating various types of latent structure within the environment, different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) enjoys several benefits, such as data-efficiency and planning, by learning a model of the environment's dynamics. However, learning a global model that can generalize across different dynamics is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Kimin Lee , Younggyo Seo , Seunghyun Lee , Honglak Lee , Jinwoo Shin

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods are appealing in the offline setting because they allow an agent to reason about the consequences of actions without interacting with the environment. Prior methods learn a 1-step dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Bogdan Mazoure , Benjamin Eysenbach , Ofir Nachum , Jonathan Tompson

Can simple algorithms with a good representation solve challenging reinforcement learning problems? In this work, we answer this question in the affirmative, where we take "simple learning algorithm" to be tabular Q-Learning, the "good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Kavosh Asadi , David Abel , Michael L. Littman

In this paper we consider self-supervised representation learning to improve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a forward prediction objective for simultaneously learning embeddings of states and action sequences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 William Whitney , Rajat Agarwal , Kyunghyun Cho , Abhinav Gupta

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yizhou Huang , Kevin Xie , Homanga Bharadhwaj , Florian Shkurti

This thesis develops methods for causal inference and causal representation learning (CRL) in high-dimensional, time-varying data. The first contribution introduces the Causal Dynamic Variational Autoencoder (CDVAE), a model for estimating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-05 Mouad EL Bouchattaoui

General-purpose agents require fine-grained controls and rich sensory inputs to perform a wide range of tasks. However, this complexity often leads to intractable decision-making. Traditionally, agents are provided with task-specific action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Rafael Rodriguez-Sanchez , George Konidaris

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential in various control tasks in terms of both sample-efficiency and final performance. However, learning a generalizable dynamics model robust to changes in dynamics remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Younggyo Seo , Kimin Lee , Ignasi Clavera , Thanard Kurutach , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel

Learning agents with reinforcement learning is difficult when dealing with long trajectories that involve a large number of states. To address these learning problems effectively, the number of states can be reduced by abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Vihang Patil , Markus Hofmarcher , Elisabeth Rumetshofer , Sepp Hochreiter

A key approach to state abstraction is approximating behavioral metrics (notably, bisimulation metrics) in the observation space and embedding these learned distances in the representation space. While promising for robustness to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Ziyan Luo , Tianwei Ni , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Xujie Si

We describe a framework for using natural language to design state abstractions for imitation learning. Generalizable policy learning in high-dimensional observation spaces is facilitated by well-designed state representations, which can…