Related papers: Discovering What You Can Control: Interventional B…

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods assume that the expert data is generated by an agent optimizing some reward function. However, in many settings, the agent may optimize a reward function subject to some constraints, where the…

Robots learning from observations in the real world using inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) may encounter objects or agents in the environment, other than the expert, that cause nuisance observations during the demonstration. These…

We present a sound and complete algorithm, called iterative causal discovery (ICD), for recovering causal graphs in the presence of latent confounders and selection bias. ICD relies on the causal Markov and faithfulness assumptions and…

Off-policy evaluation of sequential decision policies from observational data is necessary in applications of batch reinforcement learning such as education and healthcare. In such settings, however, unobserved variables confound observed…

Recent work in reinforcement learning has focused on several characteristics of learned policies that go beyond maximizing reward. These properties include fairness, explainability, generalization, and robustness. In this paper, we define…

In coming up with solutions to real-world problems, humans implicitly adhere to constraints that are too numerous and complex to be specified completely. However, reinforcement learning (RL) agents need these constraints to learn the…

As an important psychological and social experiment, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) treats the choice to cooperate or defect as an atomic action. We propose to study the behaviors of online learning algorithms in the Iterated…

We focus on the problem of sequential decision making in partially observable environments shared with other agents of uncertain types having similar or conflicting objectives. This problem has been previously formalized by multiple…

Augmenting an agent's control with useful higher-level behaviors called options can greatly reduce the sample complexity of reinforcement learning, but manually designing options is infeasible in high-dimensional and abstract state spaces.…

How to learn an effective reinforcement learning-based model for control tasks from high-level visual observations is a practical and challenging problem. A key to solving this problem is to learn low-dimensional state representations from…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents make decisions using nothing but observations from the environment, and consequently, heavily rely on the representations of those observations. Though some recent breakthroughs have used vector-based…

The i.i.d. assumption is a useful idealization that underpins many successful approaches to supervised machine learning. However, its violation can lead to models that learn to exploit spurious correlations in the training data, rendering…

Information-directed sampling (IDS) has revealed its potential as a data-efficient algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL). However, theoretical understanding of IDS for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is still limited. We develop novel…

Imitation learning suffers from causal confusion. This phenomenon occurs when learned policies attend to features that do not causally influence the expert actions but are instead spuriously correlated. Causally confused agents produce low…

Imitation Learning from observation describes policy learning in a similar way to human learning. An agent's policy is trained by observing an expert performing a task. While many state-only imitation learning approaches are based on…

Robust imitation learning using disturbance injections overcomes issues of limited variation in demonstrations. However, these methods assume demonstrations are optimal, and that policy stabilization can be learned via simple augmentations.…

Imitation learning (IL) from a state-based reinforcement learning (RL) policy is a common approach to overcome the curse of dimensionality in complex and high-dimensional observation spaces prevalent in robotics. This paper addresses the…

As a successful approach to self-supervised learning, contrastive learning aims to learn invariant information shared among distortions of the input sample. While contrastive learning has yielded continuous advancements in sampling strategy…

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms typically act on the same set of actions. However, this is not sufficient for a wide range of real-world applications where different subsets are available at each step. In this thesis, we consider the…