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Vincent Francois-Lavet

6 accepted papers

2025

Hadamax Encoding: Elevating Performance in Model-Free Atari

NeurIPS 2025poster

Neural network architectures have a large impact in machine learning. However, in the specific case of reinforcement learning, network architectures have remained notably simple, as changes often lead to small gains in performance. This work introduces a novel encoder architecture for pixel-based mo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

A Machine with Short-Term, Episodic, and Semantic Memory Systems

AAAI 2023technical

Inspired by the cognitive science theory of the explicit human memory systems, we have modeled an agent with short-term, episodic, and semantic memory systems, each of which is modeled with a knowledge graph. To evaluate this system and analyze the behavior of this agent, we designed and released ou…

2022

Reinforcement Learning with Option Machines

IJCAI 2022poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for learning complex behaviors, but lacks adoption in many settings due to sample size requirements. We introduce a framework for increasing sample efficiency of RL algorithms. Our approach focuses on optimizing environment rewards with high-level…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2020

Novelty Search in Representational Space for Sample Efficient Exploration

NeurIPS 2020oral

We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the distance of nearest neighbors in the low dimensional repre…

2020

On Overfitting and Asymptotic Bias in Batch Reinforcement Learning with Partial Observability (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2020poster

When an agent has limited information on its environment, the suboptimality of an RL algorithm can be decomposed into the sum of two terms: a term related to an asymptotic bias (suboptimality with unlimited data) and a term due to overfitting (additional suboptimality due to limited data). In the co…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

Reward Estimation for Variance Reduction in Deep Reinforcement Learning

CoRL 2018

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of goal misspecification, randomness in the reward signal, or co