Related papers: Adaptive Exploration for Data-Efficient General Va…
General Value Function (GVF) is a powerful tool to represent both the {\em predictive} and {\em retrospective} knowledge in reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, often multiple interrelated GVFs need to be evaluated jointly with…
General value functions (GVFs) in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature are long-term predictive summaries of the outcomes of agents following specific policies in the environment. Affordances as perceived action possibilities with…
Improving sample efficiency is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in environments with large state spaces and sparse rewards. In literature, this is resolved either through the use of auxiliary tasks (subgoals) or through…
We propose world value functions (WVFs), a type of goal-oriented general value function that represents how to solve not just a given task, but any other goal-reaching task in an agent's environment. This is achieved by equipping an agent…
We consider the inventory management problem, where the goal is to balance conflicting objectives such as availability and wastage of a large range of products in a store. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that utilises…
Standard RL algorithms assume fixed environment dynamics and require a significant amount of interaction to adapt to new environments. We introduce Policy-Dynamics Value Functions (PD-VF), a novel approach for rapidly adapting to dynamics…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning have inspired increasing interest in learning user modeling adaptively through dynamic interactions, e.g., in reinforcement learning based recommender systems. Reward function is crucial for most of…
We pursue a life-long learning approach to artificial intelligence that makes extensive use of reinforcement learning algorithms. We build on our prior work with general value functions (GVFs) and the Horde architecture. GVFs have been…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
Generalizing policies across different domains with dynamics mismatch poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. For example, a robot learns the policy in a simulator, but when it is deployed in the real world, the dynamics of…
For reinforcement learning on complex stochastic systems where many factors dynamically impact the output trajectories, it is desirable to effectively leverage the information from historical samples collected in previous iterations to…
Learning to evaluate and improve policies is a core problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Traditional RL algorithms learn a value function defined for a single policy. A recently explored competitive alternative is to learn a single value…
In computational reinforcement learning, a growing body of work seeks to construct an agent's perception of the world through predictions of future sensations; predictions about environment observations are used as additional input features…
Constructing general knowledge by learning task-independent models of the world can help agents solve challenging problems. However, both constructing and evaluating such models remains an open challenge. The most common approaches to…
Most reinforcement learning practitioners evaluate their policies with online Monte Carlo estimators for either hyperparameter tuning or testing different algorithmic design choices, where the policy is repeatedly executed in the…
We present a Reverse Reinforcement Learning (Reverse RL) approach for representing retrospective knowledge. General Value Functions (GVFs) have enjoyed great success in representing predictive knowledge, i.e., answering questions about…
We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…
Value-based methods for reinforcement learning lack generally applicable ways to derive behavior from a value function. Many approaches involve approximate value iteration (e.g., $Q$-learning), and acting greedily with respect to the…
Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem commonly addressed through intrinsic rewards. Recent prominent approaches are based on state novelty or variants of artificial curiosity. However, directly applying…
In addition to their undisputed success in solving classical optimization problems, neuroevolutionary and population-based algorithms have become an alternative to standard reinforcement learning methods. However, evolutionary methods often…