11 accepted papers
Recent advancements in meta-learning have enabled the automatic discovery of novel reinforcement learning algorithms parameterized by surrogate objective functions. To improve upon manually designed algorithms, the parameterization of this learned objective function must be expressive enough to repr…
Various human-designed prompt engineering techniques have been proposed to improve problem solvers based on Large Language Models (LLMs), yielding many disparate code bases. We unify these approaches by describing LLM-based agents as computational graphs. The nodes implement functions to process mul…
Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning is challenging due to delayed and stochastic outcomes. Monte Carlo targets can bridge long delays between action and consequence but lead to high-variance targets due to stochasticity. Temporal difference (TD) learning uses bootstrapping to overco…
Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning optimal policies, given goals encoded in special command inputs. Here we study goal-conditioned neural nets (NNs) that learn to generate deep NN policies in form of context-specific weight matrices, similar to Fast Weight Programmers and…
Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely believed to have the potential to improve sample efficiency by allowing an agent to synthesize large amounts of imagined experience. Experience Replay (ER) can be considered a simple kind of model, which has proved effective at improving the stabilit…
Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem commonly addressed through intrinsic rewards. Recent prominent approaches are based on state novelty or variants of artificial curiosity. However, directly applying them to partially observable environments can be ineffective a…
Meta reinforcement learning (RL) attempts to discover new RL algorithms automatically from environment interaction. In so-called black-box approaches, the policy and the learning algorithm are jointly represented by a single neural network. These methods are very flexible, but they tend to underperf…
Many concepts have been proposed for meta learning with neural networks (NNs), e.g., NNs that learn to reprogram fast weights, Hebbian plasticity, learned learning rules, and meta recurrent NNs. Our Variable Shared Meta Learning (VSML) unifies the above and demonstrates that simple weight-sharing an…
Traditional off-policy actor-critic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms learn value functions of a single target policy. However, when value functions are updated to track the learned policy, they forget potentially useful information about old policies. We introduce a class of value functions ca…
Biological evolution has distilled the experiences of many learners into the general learning algorithms of humans. Our novel meta reinforcement learning algorithm MetaGenRL is inspired by this process. MetaGenRL distills the experiences of many complex agents to meta-learn a low-complexity neural o…
Scaling model capacity has been vital in the success of deep learning. For a typical network, necessary compute resources and training time grow dramatically with model size. Conditional computation is a promising way to increase the number of parameters with a relatively small increase in resources…