Related papers: Slow Feature Analysis on Markov Chains from Goal-D…
Reinforcement learning has been successful across several applications in which agents have to learn to act in environments with sparse feedback. However, despite this empirical success there is still a lack of theoretical understanding of…
Slow feature analysis (SFA) is an unsupervised learning algorithm that extracts slowly varying features from a time series. Graph-based SFA (GSFA) is a supervised extension that can solve regression problems if followed by a post-processing…
The application of reinforcement learning algorithms onto real life problems always bears the challenge of filtering the environmental state out of raw sensor readings. While most approaches use heuristics, biology suggests that there must…
This paper studies the performative prediction problem which optimizes a stochastic loss function with data distribution that depends on the decision variable. We consider a setting where the agent(s) provides samples adapted to the…
We study offline reinforcement learning problems with a long-run average reward objective. The state-action pairs generated by any fixed behavioral policy thus follow a Markov chain, and the {\em empirical} state-action-next-state…
General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…
Scaling end-to-end reinforcement learning to control real robots from vision presents a series of challenges, in particular in terms of sample efficiency. Against end-to-end learning, state representation learning can help learn a compact,…
General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…
Learning latent features from time series data is an important problem in both machine learning and brain function. One approach, called Slow Feature Analysis (SFA), leverages the slowness of many salient features relative to the rapidly…
We consider a control problem for a finite-state Markov system whose performance is evaluated by a coherent Markov risk measure. For each policy, the risk of a state is approximated by a function of its features, thus leading to a…
This paper presents a novel yet intuitive approach to unsupervised feature learning. Inspired by the human visual system, we explore whether low-level motion-based grouping cues can be used to learn an effective visual representation.…
This article surveys recent advancements of strategy designs for persistent robotic surveillance tasks with the focus on stochastic approaches. The problem describes how mobile robots stochastically patrol a graph in an efficient way where…
Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…
Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) extracts features representing the underlying causes of changes within a temporally coherent high-dimensional raw sensory input signal. Our novel incremental version of SFA (IncSFA) combines incremental Principal…
In complex real-world tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, collecting expert demonstrations is often more straightforward than specifying precise learning objectives and task descriptions. Learning from expert data can…
In the human brain, internal states are often correlated over time (due to local recurrence and other intrinsic circuit properties), punctuated by abrupt transitions. At first glance, temporal smoothness of internal states presents a…
We study a variance reduction strategy based on control variables for simulating the averaged macroscopic behavior of a stochastic slow-fast system. We assume that this averaged behavior can be written in terms of a few slow degrees of…
A goal in the kinetic characterization of a macromolecular system is the description of its slow relaxation processes, involving (i) identification of the structural changes involved in these processes, and (ii) estimation of the rates or…
A visual system has to learn both which features to extract from images and how to group locations into (proto-)objects. Those two aspects are usually dealt with separately, although predictability is discussed as a cue for both. To…
Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…