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The high sample complexity of reinforcement learning challenges its use in practice. A promising approach is to quickly adapt pre-trained policies to new environments. Existing methods for this policy adaptation problem typically rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yuda Song , Aditi Mavalankar , Wen Sun , Sicun Gao

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in machine learning. Most work in causality starts from the premise that the causal variables themselves are observed. However, for AI agents such as robots trying to make…

Agentic reinforcement learning increasingly relies on experience-driven scaling, yet real-world environments remain non-adaptive, limited in coverage, and difficult to scale. World models offer a potential way to improve learning efficiency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yixia Li , Hongru Wang , Jiahao Qiu , Zhenfei Yin , Dongdong Zhang , Cheng Qian , Zeping Li , Pony Ma , Guanhua Chen , Heng Ji

Distributional robustness is a central goal of prediction algorithms due to the prevalent distribution shifts in real-world data. The prediction model aims to minimize the worst-case risk among a class of distributions, a.k.a., an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Marin Šola , Peter Bühlmann , Xinwei Shen

Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Haotian Ye , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang , Simon S. Du

The aim of my Ph.D. thesis concerns Reasoning in Highly Reactive Environments. As reasoning in highly reactive environments, we identify the setting in which a knowledge-based agent, with given goals, is deployed in an environment subject…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-19 Francesco Pacenza

Learning from demonstrations (LfD) is an efficient paradigm to train AI agents. But major issues arise when there are differences between (a) the demonstrator's own sensory input, (b) our sensors that observe the demonstrator and (c) the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Jalal Etesami , Philipp Geiger

We show that there may exist an inherent tension between the goal of adversarial robustness and that of standard generalization. Specifically, training robust models may not only be more resource-consuming, but also lead to a reduction of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-10 Dimitris Tsipras , Shibani Santurkar , Logan Engstrom , Alexander Turner , Aleksander Madry

Learning robust and generalizable world models is crucial for enabling efficient and scalable robotic control in real-world environments. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for learning world models that accurately capture…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Chenhao Li , Andreas Krause , Marco Hutter

Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Mahault Albarracin , Ines Hipolito , Maria Raffa , Paul Kinghorn

The ability to perform causal and counterfactual reasoning are central properties of human intelligence. Decision-making systems that can perform these types of reasoning have the potential to be more generalizable and interpretable.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Daniel McDuff , Yale Song , Jiyoung Lee , Vibhav Vineet , Sai Vemprala , Nicholas Gyde , Hadi Salman , Shuang Ma , Kwanghoon Sohn , Ashish Kapoor

Model-based methods have recently shown promising for offline reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to learn good policies from historical data without interacting with the environment. Previous model-based offline RL methods learn fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Zheng-Mao Zhu , Xiong-Hui Chen , Hong-Long Tian , Kun Zhang , Yang Yu

With recent and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the foundation of purposeful behaviour in autonomous agents is crucial for developing safe and efficient systems. While artificial neural networks have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Aswin Paul , Moein Khajehnejad , Forough Habibollahi , Brett J. Kagan , Adeel Razi

This paper develops a Bayesian framework for robust causal inference from longitudinal observational data. Many contemporary methods rely on structural assumptions, such as factor models, to adjust for unobserved confounding, but they can…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-20 Angelos Alexopoulos , Nikolaos Demiris

Despite the increasing relevance of forecasting methods, causal implications of these algorithms remain largely unexplored. This is concerning considering that, even under simplifying assumptions such as causal sufficiency, the statistical…

Causal modeling provides us with powerful counterfactual reasoning and interventional mechanism to generate predictions and reason under various what-if scenarios. However, causal discovery using observation data remains a nontrivial task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Jawad Chowdhury , Rezaur Rashid , Gabriel Terejanu

This PhD thesis contains several contributions to the field of statistical causal modeling. Statistical causal models are statistical models embedded with causal assumptions that allow for the inference and reasoning about the behavior of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-05 Martin Emil Jakobsen

We present an approach for the quantification of the usefulness of transfer in reinforcement learning via regret bounds for a multi-agent setting. Considering a number of $\aleph$ agents operating in the same Markov decision process,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Adrienne Tuynman , Ronald Ortner

We propose a set of precise criteria for saying a neural net learns and uses a "world model." The goal is to give an operational meaning to terms that are often used informally, in order to provide a common language for experimental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Kenneth Li , Fernanda Viégas , Martin Wattenberg

Assessing the systemic effects of uncertainty that arises from agents' partial observation of the true states of the world is critical for understanding a wide range of scenarios. Yet, previous modeling work on agent learning and…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2022-04-15 Wolfram Barfuss , Richard P. Mann