12.1 Advanced Topics in Reinforcement Learning

A formal framework that defines probability using three fundamental rules, ensuring consistency in measuring uncertainty. 🎲

Imitation Learning

  • Learn a policy \(\pi(a|s)\) by mimicking an expert’s demonstrations, \((s, a)\), without requiring explicit reward signals.

Application: Autonomous Driving
Link to Research Paper

Inverse Reinforcement Learning

  • Infer the reward function \(R(s, a)\) given expert trajectories to derive an optimal policy, \(\pi^*\).

Application: Predicting Driver Behavior and Route Recommendation
Link to Research Paper

Offline Reinforcement Learning

  • Learn a policy \(\pi(a|s)\) from a fixed dataset \(D = \{(s, a, r, s')\}\) without further environment interaction.

Application: Robotic Manipulation
Link to Research Paper

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

  • Optimize multiple agents’ policies \(\pi_i(a|s)\) interacting in a shared environment, considering cooperation or competition.

Application: Strategic Game-play in Dota2
Link to Research Paper

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

  • Decompose tasks into a hierarchy of policies, \(\pi_\text{high}(g|s)\) for goals and \(\pi_\text{low}(a|s, g)\) for actions.

Application: MuJoCo Ant Maze Path Finding
Link to Research Paper

Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

  • Optimize a policy \(\pi(a|s)\) under multiple conflicting objectives, \(\{R_1, R_2, \dots\}\)

Application: Resource Allocation
Link to Research Paper

Meta Learning

  • Train agents to quickly adapt to new tasks \(\mathcal{T}\) by optimizing over task distributions \(p(\mathcal{T})\).

Application: Few Shot Learning
Link to Research Paper