Related papers: When does Self-Prediction help? Understanding Auxi…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…
In model-based reinforcement learning, the agent interleaves between model learning and planning. These two components are inextricably intertwined. If the model is not able to provide sensible long-term prediction, the executed planner…
Model-Based Reinforcement Learning involves learning a \textit{dynamics model} from data, and then using this model to optimise behaviour, most often with an online \textit{planner}. Much of the recent research along these lines presents a…
Human beings can leverage knowledge from relative tasks to improve learning on a primary task. Similarly, multi-task learning methods suggest using auxiliary tasks to enhance a neural network's performance on a specific primary task.…
Distinguishing if an action is performed as intended or if an intended action fails is an important skill that not only humans have, but that is also important for intelligent systems that operate in human environments. Recognizing if an…
Much of model-based reinforcement learning involves learning a model of an agent's world, and training an agent to leverage this model to perform a task more efficiently. While these models are demonstrably useful for agents, every…
Auxiliary tasks have been argued to be useful for representation learning in reinforcement learning. Although many auxiliary tasks have been empirically shown to be effective for accelerating learning on the main task, it is not yet clear…
Causal representation learning seeks to recover latent factors that generate observational data through a mixing function. Needing assumptions on latent structures or relationships to achieve identifiability in general, prior works often…
The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…
In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in the representation learning of graph-structured data and provided state-of-the-art performance in various applications such as link prediction, node classification,…
An increasingly popular machine learning paradigm is to pretrain a neural network (NN) on many tasks offline, then adapt it to downstream tasks, often by re-training only the last linear layer of the network. This approach yields strong…
Training neural networks with auxiliary tasks is a common practice for improving the performance on a main task of interest. Two main challenges arise in this multi-task learning setting: (i) designing useful auxiliary tasks; and (ii)…
To increase autonomy in reinforcement learning, agents need to learn useful behaviours without reliance on manually designed reward functions. To that end, skill discovery methods have been used to learn the intrinsic options available to…
One of the main arguments behind studying disentangled representations is the assumption that they can be easily reused in different tasks. At the same time finding a joint, adaptable representation of data is one of the key challenges in…
Self-supervised learning has significantly improved the performance of many NLP tasks. However, how can self-supervised learning discover useful representations, and why is it better than traditional approaches such as probabilistic models…
Multi-task learning (MTL) has recently contributed to learning better representations in service of various NLP tasks. MTL aims at improving the performance of a primary task, by jointly training on a secondary task. This paper introduces…
In standard reinforcement learning settings, agents typically assume immediate feedback about the effects of their actions after taking them. However, in practice, this assumption may not hold true due to physical constraints and can…
Predicting a vehicle's trajectory is an essential ability for autonomous vehicles navigating through complex urban traffic scenes. Bird's-eye-view roadmap information provides valuable information for making trajectory predictions, and…
A key property of neural networks (both biological and artificial) is how they learn to represent and manipulate input information in order to solve a task. Different types of representations may be suited to different types of tasks,…
Learned dynamics models combined with both planning and policy learning algorithms have shown promise in enabling artificial agents to learn to perform many diverse tasks with limited supervision. However, one of the fundamental challenges…