Related papers: Graph-attention-based Casual Discovery with Trust …
The safe application of reinforcement learning (RL) requires generalization from limited training data to unseen scenarios. Yet, fulfilling tasks under changing circumstances is a key challenge in RL. Current state-of-the-art approaches for…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…
Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…
Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is essential for developing agents that can learn, adapt, and accumulate knowledge over time. However, a fundamental challenge persists as agents must strike a delicate balance between plasticity,…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) studies problems where an intelligent agent has to not only maximize reward but also avoid exploring unsafe areas. In this study, we propose CUP, a novel policy optimization method based on Constrained…
Causal discovery is a fundamental problem with applications spanning various areas in science and engineering. It is well understood that solely using observational data, one can only orient the causal graph up to its Markov equivalence…
Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…
Decision-making tasks often unfold on graphs with spatial-temporal dynamics. Black-box reinforcement learning often overlooks how local changes spread through network structure, limiting sample efficiency and interpretability. We present…
Causal dynamics learning has recently emerged as a promising approach to enhancing robustness in reinforcement learning (RL). Typically, the goal is to build a dynamics model that makes predictions based on the causal relationships among…
Trust region methods, such as TRPO, are often used to stabilize policy optimization algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). While current trust region strategies are effective for continuous control, they typically require a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to solve the problem of finding obstacle-free paths for autonomous agents operating in stochastic and uncertain environments. However, when the underlying stochastic dynamics of the…
The process of discovery requires active exploration -- the act of collecting new and informative data. However, efficient autonomous exploration remains a major unsolved problem. The dominant paradigm addresses this challenge by using…
Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) often struggles with long-horizon tasks, where errors in value estimation accumulate and produce unreliable policies. It is typically assumed that effective long-term planning is…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes the policy on a previously collected dataset without any interactions with the environment, yet usually suffers from the distributional shift problem. To mitigate this issue, a typical solution…
This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…
Through recognizing causal subgraphs, causal graph learning (CGL) has risen to be a promising approach for improving the generalizability of graph neural networks under out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. However, the empirical successes…
Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have exhibited remarkable performance across a wide range of domains. However, existing RAG approaches primarily operate on unstructured data and…
Causal models seek to unravel the cause-effect relationships among variables from observed data, as opposed to mere mappings among them, as traditional regression models do. This paper introduces a novel causal discovery algorithm designed…
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) represent the gold standard for causal inference yet remain a scarce resource. While large-scale observational data is often available, it is utilized only for retrospective fusion, and remains discarded…
A common challenge for decision makers is selecting actions whose rewards are unknown and evolve over time based on prior policies. For instance, repeated use may reduce an action's effectiveness (habituation), while inactivity may restore…