172 citations · 530 across the 32 of their papers we have counts for
32 papers
A Kernel Perspective on Behavioural Metrics for Markov Decision Processes
Pablo Samuel Castro, Tyler Kastner, Prakash Panangaden +1
Behavioural metrics have been shown to be an effective mechanism for constructing representations in reinforcement learning. We present a novel perspective on behavioural metrics f…
Offline Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Q-Function Regularization
Laixi Shi, Robert Dadashi, Yuejie Chi +2
The core challenge of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is dealing with the (potentially catastrophic) extrapolation error induced by the distribution shift between the history d…
Minigrid & Miniworld: Modular & Customizable Reinforcement Learning Environments for Goal-Oriented Tasks
Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Bolun Dai, Mark Towers +6
We present the Minigrid and Miniworld libraries which provide a suite of goal-oriented 2D and 3D environments. The libraries were explicitly created with a minimalistic design para…
Bigger, Better, Faster: Human-level Atari with human-level efficiency
Max Schwarzer, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville +3
We introduce a value-based RL agent, which we call BBF, that achieves super-human performance in the Atari 100K benchmark. BBF relies on scaling the neural networks used for value…
Proto-Value Networks: Scaling Representation Learning with Auxiliary Tasks
Jesse Farebrother, Joshua Greaves, Rishabh Agarwal +4
Auxiliary tasks improve the representations learned by deep reinforcement learning agents. Analytically, their effect is reasonably well understood; in practice, however, their pri…
JaxPruner: A concise library for sparsity research
Joo Hyung Lee, Wonpyo Park, Nicole Mitchell +22
This paper introduces JaxPruner, an open-source JAX-based pruning and sparse training library for machine learning research. JaxPruner aims to accelerate research on sparse neural…
The Dormant Neuron Phenomenon in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Ghada Sokar, Rishabh Agarwal, Pablo Samuel Castro +1
In this work we identify the dormant neuron phenomenon in deep reinforcement learning, where an agent's network suffers from an increasing number of inactive neurons, thereby affec…
The State of Sparse Training in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Laura Graesser, Utku Evci, Erich Elsen +1
The use of sparse neural networks has seen rapid growth in recent years, particularly in computer vision. Their appeal stems largely from the reduced number of parameters required…
Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning: Reusing Prior Computation to Accelerate Progress
Rishabh Agarwal, Max Schwarzer, Pablo Samuel Castro +2
Learning tabula rasa, that is without any prior knowledge, is the prevalent workflow in reinforcement learning (RL) research. However, RL systems, when applied to large-scale setti…
Malakai: Music That Adapts to the Shape of Emotions
Zack Harris, Liam Atticus Clarke, Pietro Gagliano +3
The advent of ML music models such as Google Magenta's MusicVAE now allow us to extract and replicate compositional features from otherwise complex datasets. These models allow com…
Losses, Dissonances, and Distortions
Pablo Samuel Castro
In this paper I present a study in using the losses and gradients obtained during the training of a simple function approximator as a mechanism for creating musical dissonance and…
The Difficulty of Passive Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Georg Ostrovski, Pablo Samuel Castro, Will Dabney
Learning to act from observational data without active environmental interaction is a well-known challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Recent approaches involve constraints on…
Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice
Rishabh Agarwal, Max Schwarzer, Pablo Samuel Castro +2
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are predominantly evaluated by comparing their relative performance on a large suite of tasks. Most published results on deep RL benchma…
A general class of surrogate functions for stable and efficient reinforcement learning
Sharan Vaswani, Olivier Bachem, Simone Totaro +6
Common policy gradient methods rely on the maximization of a sequence of surrogate functions. In recent years, many such surrogate functions have been proposed, most without strong…
MICo: Improved representations via sampling-based state similarity for Markov decision processes
Pablo Samuel Castro, Tyler Kastner, Prakash Panangaden +1
We present a new behavioural distance over the state space of a Markov decision process, and demonstrate the use of this distance as an effective means of shaping the learnt repres…
Metrics and continuity in reinforcement learning
Charline Le Lan, Marc G. Bellemare, Pablo Samuel Castro
In most practical applications of reinforcement learning, it is untenable to maintain direct estimates for individual states; in continuous-state systems, it is impossible. Instead…
Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Rishabh Agarwal, Marlos C. Machado, Pablo Samuel Castro +1
Reinforcement learning methods trained on few environments rarely learn policies that generalize to unseen environments. To improve generalization, we incorporate the inherent sequ…
GANterpretations
Pablo Samuel Castro
Since the introduction of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) [Goodfellow et al., 2014] there has been a regular stream of both technical advances (e.g., Arjovsky et al. [2017])…
Revisiting Rainbow: Promoting more Insightful and Inclusive Deep Reinforcement Learning Research
Johan S. Obando-Ceron, Pablo Samuel Castro
Since the introduction of DQN, a vast majority of reinforcement learning research has focused on reinforcement learning with deep neural networks as function approximators. New met…
Scalable methods for computing state similarity in deterministic Markov Decision Processes
Pablo Samuel Castro
We present new algorithms for computing and approximating bisimulation metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Bisimulation metrics are an elegant formalism that capture behav…
Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners
Utku Evci, Trevor Gale, Jacob Menick +2
Many applications require sparse neural networks due to space or inference time restrictions. There is a large body of work on training dense networks to yield sparse networks for…
Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Multiple Ranked Experts
Pablo Samuel Castro, Shijian Li, Daqing Zhang
We consider the problem of learning to behave optimally in a Markov Decision Process when a reward function is not specified, but instead we have access to a set of demonstrators o…
Performing Structured Improvisations with pre-trained Deep Learning Models
Pablo Samuel Castro
The quality of outputs produced by deep generative models for music have seen a dramatic improvement in the last few years. However, most deep learning models perform in "offline"…
A Comparative Analysis of Expected and Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Clare Lyle, Pablo Samuel Castro, Marc G. Bellemare
Since their introduction a year ago, distributional approaches to reinforcement learning (distributional RL) have produced strong results relative to the standard approach which mo…