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When environmental interaction is expensive, model-based reinforcement learning offers a solution by planning ahead and avoiding costly mistakes. Model-based agents typically learn a single-step transition model. In this paper, we propose a…
Model-based reinforcement learning is one approach to increase sample efficiency. However, the accuracy of the dynamics model and the resulting compounding error over modelled trajectories are commonly regarded as key limitations. A natural…
In model-based reinforcement learning, most algorithms rely on simulating trajectories from one-step models of the dynamics learned on data. A critical challenge of this approach is the compounding of one-step prediction errors as the…
Poor sample efficiency continues to be the primary challenge for deployment of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for real-world applications, and in particular for visuo-motor control. Model-based RL has the potential to be highly…
One of the key reasons for the high sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL) is the inability to transfer knowledge from one task to another. In standard multi-task RL settings, low-reward data collected while trying to solve one…
Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising framework to learn policies through environment interaction, but often requires an infeasible amount of interaction data to solve complex tasks from sparse rewards. One direction includes…
A common optimization tool used in deep reinforcement learning is momentum, which consists in accumulating and discounting past gradients, reapplying them at each iteration. We argue that, unlike in supervised learning, momentum in Temporal…
In reinforcement learning, Reverse Experience Replay (RER) is a recently proposed algorithm that attains better sample complexity than the classic experience replay method. RER requires the learning algorithm to update the parameters…
A common strategy in transfer learning is few shot fine-tuning, but its success is highly dependent on the quality of samples selected as training examples. Active learning methods such as uncertainty sampling and diversity sampling can…
While reinforcement learning (RL) methods that learn an internal model of the environment have the potential to be more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts, learning to model raw observations from high dimensional sensors…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can suffer from poor sample efficiency when rewards are delayed and sparse. We introduce a solution that enables agents to learn temporally extended actions at multiple levels of abstraction in a…
Despite the prevalence of retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs), the seamless integration of these models with retrieval mechanisms to enhance performance in document-based tasks remains challenging. While some post-retrieval…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…
Random features (RFs) are a popular technique to scale up kernel methods in machine learning, replacing exact kernel evaluations with stochastic Monte Carlo estimates. They underpin models as diverse as efficient transformers (by…
Model-based reinforcement learning uses models to plan, where the predictions and policies of an agent can be improved by using more computation without additional data from the environment, thereby improving sample efficiency. However,…
Despite the advantageous subquadratic complexity of modern recurrent deep learning models -- such as state-space models (SSMs) -- recent studies have highlighted their potential shortcomings compared to transformers on reasoning and…
As representation learning becomes a powerful technique to reduce sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL) in practice, theoretical understanding of its advantage is still limited. In this paper, we theoretically characterize the…
For many machine learning problems, data is abundant and it may be prohibitive to make multiple passes through the full training set. In this context, we investigate strategies for dynamically increasing the effective sample size, when…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known…
Modern deep reinforcement learning methods have departed from the incremental learning required for eligibility traces, rendering the implementation of the $\lambda$-return difficult in this context. In particular, off-policy methods that…