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Although reinforcement learning has seen tremendous success recently, this kind of trial-and-error learning can be impractical or inefficient in complex environments. The use of demonstrations, on the other hand, enables agents to benefit…
Multi-scale resolution training has seen an increased adoption across multiple vision tasks, including classification and detection. Training with smaller resolutions enables faster training at the expense of a drop in accuracy. Conversely,…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems traditionally employ sophisticated training strategies to enhance robustness against retrieval noise. In this work, we investigate a critical question: does the benefit of these complex robust…
Multi-step temporal-difference (TD) learning, where the update targets contain information from multiple time steps ahead, is one of the most popular forms of TD learning for linear function approximation. The reason is that multi-step…
Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to simultaneously learn policies for solving many tasks. Several prior works have found that relabeling past experience with different reward functions can improve sample efficiency. Relabeling…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms often require long training to become useful, especially in complex environments with sparse rewards. While techniques like reward shaping and curriculum learning exist to accelerate training, these…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has delivered strong results in domains such as Atari and Go, but it still suffers from high sample cost and weak transfer beyond the training setting. A common response is to reuse information from…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging in the common case of delays between events and their sensory perceptions. State-of-the-art (SOTA) state augmentation techniques either suffer from state space explosion or performance degeneration…
Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms distill experience into parametric behavior policies or value functions via gradient updates. While effective, this approach has several disadvantages: (1) it is computationally expensive,…
We study a posterior sampling approach to efficient exploration in constrained reinforcement learning. Alternatively to existing algorithms, we propose two simple algorithms that are more efficient statistically, simpler to implement and…
The Backprop algorithm for learning in neural networks utilizes two mechanisms: first, stochastic gradient descent and second, initialization with small random weights, where the latter is essential to the effectiveness of the former. We…
In real-world reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, agents often encounter partial observability, where incomplete or noisy information obscures the true state of the environment. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are…
Large language models show impressive results on few-shot NLP tasks. However, these models are memory and computation-intensive. Meta-training allows one to leverage smaller models for few-shot generalization in a domain-general and…
Experience replay is a foundational technique in reinforcement learning that enhances learning stability by storing past experiences in a replay buffer and reusing them during training. Despite its practical success, its theoretical…
Recent work on the Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) model has shown that off-loading memory from trainable weights to a retrieval database can significantly improve language modeling and match the performance of non-retrieval models…
In online convex optimization it is well known that certain subclasses of objective functions are much easier than arbitrary convex functions. We are interested in designing adaptive methods that can automatically get fast rates in as many…
One of the main challenges in real-world reinforcement learning is to learn successfully from limited training samples. We show that in certain settings, the available data can be dramatically increased through a form of multi-task…
Experience replay is a key component in reinforcement learning for stabilizing learning and improving sample efficiency. Its typical implementation samples transitions with replacement from a replay buffer. In contrast, in supervised…
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…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…