Theses and Dissertations

Fall 2024

Coblin, Jordan Frederick

The sensitivity of reinforcement learning algorithm performance to hyperparameter choices poses a significant hurdle to the deployment of these algorithms in the real-world, where sampling can be limited by speed, safety, or other system constraints. To mitigate this, one approach is to learn a...

Fall 2024

Li, Yuxuan

Reinforcement learning has been widely applied in different control tasks. However, its performance often faces the challenge of low sample efficiency. Introducing human prior knowledge is often seen as a possible solution, such as behaviour cloning, learning from advice, and inverse...

Fall 2023

Meyer, Edan J

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents learn to maximize a reward signal using nothing but observations from the environment as input to their decision making processes. Whether the agent is simple, consisting of only a policy that maps observations to actions, or complex, containing auxiliary...

Spring 2020

Jafferjee, Taher

In Dyna style algorithms, reinforcement learning (RL) agents use a model of the environment to generate simulated experience. By updating on this simulated experience, Dyna style algorithms allow agents to potentially learn control policies in fewer environment interactions than agents that use...

Fall 2023

He, Jiamin

Off-policy policy evaluation has been a critical and challenging problem in reinforcement learning, and Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is one of the most important approaches for addressing it. There has been significant interest in searching for off-policy TD algorithms which find the same...

Fall 2021

McLeod, Matthew

Learning auxiliary tasks, such as multiple predictions about the world, can provide many benets to reinforcement learning systems. A variety of off-policy learning algorithms have been developed to learn such predictions, but as yet there is little work on how to adapt the behavior to gather...

Fall 2023

Mitchell, Daniel

Multilevel action selection is a reinforcement learning technique in which an action is broken into two parts, the type and the parameters. When using multilevel action selection in reinforcement learning, one must break the action space into multiple subsets. These subsets are typically disjoint...

Fall 2016

Johnson, Stuart H

Current medical imaging professional training uses an apprenticeship model with students following an established doctor and viewing their cases, in what is called a practicum. This posses an issue as students are limited to the cases available during their practicum. To resolve this automated...

Fall 2023

Noriega, Roberto

An open-pit mine is a highly dynamic environment where different equipment resources are allocated to mining areas to extract metal-bearing rock and waste, for pit development, following a set flow of activities. The material mined is then transported through the mine road network to different...

Spring 2024

Zhang, Tianyu

Retrofitting buildings and optimizing their operation have been at the forefront of global efforts to reduce carbon emissions over the past few decades. Intelligent control of building systems, such as Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC), presents two clear benefits: it improves...