Related papers: Leveraging Prior Knowledge in Reinforcement Learni…
Feature selection in reinforcement learning (RL), i.e. choosing basis functions such that useful approximations of the unkown value function can be obtained, is one of the main challenges in scaling RL to real-world applications. Here we…
An important property for lifelong-learning agents is the ability to combine existing skills to solve unseen tasks. In general, however, it is unclear how to compose skills in a principled way. We provide a "recipe" for optimal value…
The idea of reusing or transferring information from previously learned tasks (source tasks) for the learning of new tasks (target tasks) has the potential to significantly improve the sample efficiency of a reinforcement learning agent. In…
Reinforcement learning has been explored for many problems, from video games with deterministic environments to portfolio and operations management in which scenarios are stochastic; however, there have been few attempts to test these…
We present a bound for value-prediction error with respect to model misspecification that is tight, including constant factors. This is a direct improvement of the "simulation lemma," a foundational result in reinforcement learning. We…
An open problem in artificial intelligence is how to learn and represent knowledge that is sufficient for a general agent that needs to solve multiple tasks in a given world. In this work we propose world value functions (WVFs), which are a…
Online reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse rewards poses a challenge partly because of the lack of feedback on states leading to the goal. Furthermore, expert offline data with reward signal is rarely available to provide this feedback…
Being able to reason in an environment with a large number of discrete actions is essential to bringing reinforcement learning to a larger class of problems. Recommender systems, industrial plants and language models are only some of the…
Double Q-learning is a popular reinforcement learning algorithm in Markov decision process (MDP) problems. Clipped Double Q-learning, as an effective variant of Double Q-learning, employs the clipped double estimator to approximate the…
Reinforcement learning is a general technique that allows an agent to learn an optimal policy and interact with an environment in sequential decision making problems. The goodness of a policy is measured by its value function starting from…
In practical reinforcement learning (RL), the discount factor used for estimating value functions often differs from that used for defining the evaluation objective. In this work, we study the effect that this discrepancy of discount…
We generalise the problem of inverse reinforcement learning to multiple tasks, from multiple demonstrations. Each one may represent one expert trying to solve a different task, or as different experts trying to solve the same task. Our main…
Reinforcement learning has been shown to perform a range of complex tasks through interaction with an environment or collected leveraging experience. However, many of these approaches presume optimal or near optimal experiences or the…
The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…
Value estimation is a critical component of the reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. The question of how to effectively learn value predictors from data is one of the major problems studied by the RL community, and different approaches…
In this paper, we propose a generic framework for devising an adaptive approximation scheme for value function approximation in reinforcement learning, which introduces multiscale approximation. The two basic ingredients are multiresolution…
When deploying autonomous agents in unstructured environments over sustained periods of time, adaptability and robustness oftentimes outweigh optimality as a primary consideration. In other words, safety and survivability constraints play a…
In this paper, we study the Tiered Reinforcement Learning setting, a parallel transfer learning framework, where the goal is to transfer knowledge from the low-tier (source) task to the high-tier (target) task to reduce the exploration risk…
Deep reinforcement learning enables algorithms to learn complex behavior, deal with continuous action spaces and find good strategies in environments with high dimensional state spaces. With deep reinforcement learning being an active area…
We consider the differentiation of the value function for parametric optimization problems. Such problems are ubiquitous in Machine Learning applications such as structured support vector machines, matrix factorization and min-min or…