Related papers: Building Minimal and Reusable Causal State Abstrac…
Current Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods often suffer from sample-inefficiency, resulting from blind exploration strategies that neglect causal relationships among states, actions, and rewards. Although recent causal approaches aim to…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can enable agents to learn complex tasks. However, it is difficult to interpret the knowledge and reuse it across tasks. Inductive biases can address such issues by explicitly providing generic yet useful…
Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems…
While reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved great success in acquiring complex skills solely from environmental interactions, it assumes that resets to the initial state are readily available at the end of each episode. Such an…
A key capability of intelligent agents is operating under partial observability: reasoning and acting effectively despite missing or incomplete state observations. While recurrent (memory-based) policies learned via reinforcement learning…
Causal representation learning (CRL) enhances machine learning models' robustness and generalizability by learning structural causal models associated with data-generating processes. We focus on a family of CRL methods that uses contrastive…
Causal learning has long concerned itself with the accurate recovery of underlying causal mechanisms. Such causal modelling enables better explanations of out-of-distribution data. Prior works on causal learning assume that the high-level…
Low sample efficiency is an enduring challenge of reinforcement learning (RL). With the advent of versatile large language models (LLMs), recent works impart common-sense knowledge to accelerate policy learning for RL processes. However, we…
Many open problems in machine learning are intrinsically related to causality, however, the use of causal analysis in machine learning is still in its early stage. Within a general reinforcement learning setting, we consider the problem of…
This paper studies systematic exploration for reinforcement learning with rich observations and function approximation. We introduce a new model called contextual decision processes, that unifies and generalizes most prior settings. Our…
Context-based offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) methods have achieved appealing success by leveraging pre-collected offline datasets to develop task representations that guide policy learning. However, current context-based OMRL…
Consider the finite state graph that results from a simple, discrete, dynamical system in which an agent moves in a rectangular grid picking up and dropping packages. Can the state variables of the problem, namely, the agent location and…
Complex systems are ubiquitous in the real world and tend to have complicated and poorly understood dynamics. For their control issues, the challenge is to guarantee accuracy, robustness, and generalization in such bloated and troubled…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying real-world control systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we study the problem of continuous-time reinforcement…
Many reinforcement learning (RL) environments consist of independent entities that interact sparsely. In such environments, RL agents have only limited influence over other entities in any particular situation. Our idea in this work is that…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) and causal MABs (CMAB) are established frameworks for decision-making problems. The majority of prior work typically studies and solves individual MAB and CMAB in isolation for a given problem and associated data.…
In Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), incorporating causal structures into dynamics models provides agents with a structured understanding of the environments, enabling efficient decision. Empowerment as an intrinsic motivation…
The goal of continual learning (CL) is to learn a sequence of tasks without suffering from the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting. Previous work has shown that leveraging memory in the form of a replay buffer can reduce performance…
Many dynamic processes, including common scenarios in robotic control and reinforcement learning (RL), involve a set of interacting subprocesses. Though the subprocesses are not independent, their interactions are often sparse, and the…
Enabling reinforcement learning (RL) agents to leverage a knowledge base while learning from experience promises to advance RL in knowledge intensive domains. However, it has proven difficult to leverage knowledge that is not manually…