Related papers: Is Q-learning an Ill-posed Problem?
This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…
Artificial neural networks are promising for general function approximation but challenging to train on non-independent or non-identically distributed data due to catastrophic forgetting. The experience replay buffer, a standard component…
While recent progress has spawned very powerful machine learning systems, those agents remain extremely specialized and fail to transfer the knowledge they gain to similar yet unseen tasks. In this paper, we study a simple reinforcement…
In some agent designs like inverse reinforcement learning an agent needs to learn its own reward function. Learning the reward function and optimising for it are typically two different processes, usually performed at different stages. We…
A central question in machine learning is how reliable the predictions of a trained model are. Reliability includes the identification of instances for which a model is likely not to be trusted based on an analysis of the learning system…
Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…
Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…
Existing inverse reinforcement learning methods (e.g. MaxEntIRL, $f$-IRL) search over candidate reward functions and solve a reinforcement learning problem in the inner loop. This creates a rather strange inversion where a harder problem,…
Various algorithms in reinforcement learning exhibit dramatic variability in their convergence rates and ultimate accuracy as a function of the problem structure. Such instance-specific behavior is not captured by existing global minimax…
This work provides a rigorous framework for studying continuous time control problems in uncertain environments. The framework considered models uncertainty in state dynamics as a measure on the space of functions. This measure is…
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in deep learning regression is of wide interest, as it supports critical applications including sequential decision making and risk-sensitive tasks. In heteroskedastic regression, where the uncertainty of the…
In reinforcement learning (RL), Q-learning is a fundamental algorithm whose convergence is guaranteed in the tabular setting. However, this convergence guarantee does not hold under linear function approximation. To overcome this…
In learning problems, the noise inherent to the task at hand hinders the possibility to infer without a certain degree of uncertainty. Quantifying this uncertainty, regardless of its wide use, assumes high relevance for security-sensitive…
A major problem in machine learning is that of inductive bias: how to choose a learner's hypothesis space so that it is large enough to contain a solution to the problem being learnt, yet small enough to ensure reliable generalization from…
Machine learning methods can be unreliable when deployed in domains that differ from the domains on which they were trained. There are a wide range of proposals for mitigating this problem by learning representations that are ``invariant''…
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to developing hard-to-engineer adaptive solutions for complex and diverse robotic tasks. However, learning with real-world robots is often unreliable and difficult, which resulted in their low…
Robust controllers ensure stability in feedback loops designed under uncertainty but at the cost of performance. Model uncertainty in time-invariant systems can be reduced by recently proposed learning-based methods, which improve the…
Many practical applications of reinforcement learning (RL) constrain the agent to learn from a fixed offline dataset of logged interactions, which has already been gathered, without offering further possibility for data collection. However,…
Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…
Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) works well when experience can be collected cheaply and model-based RL is effective when system dynamics can be modeled accurately. However, both assumptions can be violated in real world problems such…