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Melih Kandemir

11 accepted papers

2026

Bridging the performance-gap between target-free and target-based reinforcement learning

ICLR 2026poster

The use of target networks in deep reinforcement learning is a widely popular solution to mitigate the brittleness of semi-gradient approaches and stabilize learning. However, target networks notoriously require additional memory and delay the propagation of Bellman updates compared to an ideal targ…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Deterministic Uncertainty Propagation for Improved Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Current approaches to model-based offline reinforcement learning often incorporate uncertainty-based reward penalization to address the distributional shift problem. These approaches, commonly known as pessimistic value iteration, use Monte Carlo sampling to estimate the Bellman target to perform te…

2023

Improved Algorithms for Stochastic Linear Bandits Using Tail Bounds for Martingale Mixtures

NeurIPS 2023oral

We present improved algorithms with worst-case regret guarantees for the stochastic linear bandit problem. The widely used "optimism in the face of uncertainty" principle reduces a stochastic bandit problem to the construction of a confidence sequence for the unknown reward function. The performance…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2022

Learning interacting dynamical systems with latent Gaussian process ODEs

NeurIPS 2022accept

We study uncertainty-aware modeling of continuous-time dynamics of interacting objects. We introduce a new model that decomposes independent dynamics of single objects accurately from their interactions. By employing latent Gaussian process ordinary differential equations, our model infers both inde…

2021

Learning Partially Known Stochastic Dynamics with Empirical PAC Bayes

AISTATS 2021poster

Neural Stochastic Differential Equations model a dynamical environment with neural nets assigned to their drift and diffusion terms. The high expressive power of their nonlinearity comes at the expense of instability in the identification of the large set of free parameters. This paper presents a re…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2019

Sampling-Free Variational Inference of Bayesian Neural Networks by Variance Backpropagation

UAI 2019poster

We propose a new Bayesian Neural Net formulation that affords variational inference for which the evidence lower bound is analytically tractable subject to a tight approximation. We achieve this tractability by (i) decomposing ReLU nonlinearities into the product of an identity and a Heaviside step…

2017

Variational Bayesian Multiple Instance Learning With Gaussian Processes

CVPR 2017poster

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are effective Bayesian predictors. We here show for the first time that instance labels of a GP classifier can be inferred in the multiple instance learning (MIL) setting using variational Bayes. We achieve this via a new construction of the bag likelihood that assumes a lar…

Cited by 45PDFcodeScholar