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Theses and Dissertations
This collection contains theses and dissertations of graduate students of the University of Alberta. The collection contains a very large number of theses electronically available that were granted from 1947 to 2009, 90% of theses granted from 2009-2014, and 100% of theses granted from April 2014 to the present (as long as the theses are not under temporary embargo by agreement with the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies). IMPORTANT NOTE: To conduct a comprehensive search of all UofA theses granted and in University of Alberta Libraries collections, search the library catalogue at www.library.ualberta.ca - you may search by Author, Title, Keyword, or search by Department.
To retrieve all theses and dissertations associated with a specific department from the library catalogue, choose 'Advanced' and keyword search "university of alberta dept of english" OR "university of alberta department of english" (for example). Past graduates who wish to have their thesis or dissertation added to this collection can contact us at erahelp@ualberta.ca.
Items in this Collection
- 13Reinforcement Learning
- 4Machine Learning
- 2Neural Networks
- 1Adaptive Decision-making
- 1Artificial Intelligence
- 1Auxiliary Tasks
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Spring 2021
Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and representation learning. The question we tackle in this...
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Fall 2021
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...
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Spring 2021
This thesis investigates the use of general value functions for detecting anomalous behavior in machines. Identifying abnormal behavior is critical for ensuring the safety and reliability of any machine or industrial process. When the cause of these anomalies is due to accumulated wear on...
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Fall 2021
Powered by advancements of information and Internet technologies, there has been a rapid development in network based applications in recent years. Meanwhile, it is recognized that more attentions need to be paid to the issue of cybersecurity. The security of the network environment plays a vital...
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Fall 2021
Continuous-time reinforcement learning tasks commonly use discrete time steps of fixed cycle times for actions. Choosing a small action-cycle time in such tasks allows reinforcement learning agents fast reaction and a more temporally detailed perception of the environment. The learning...
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Fall 2021
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have been employed in a variety of applications, ranging from surveillance to emergency operations. These systems comprise an ”inner loop” that provides stability and control and an ”outer loop” in charge of mission-level tasks, such as way-point...
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Fall 2021
The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) agents is sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters. In real-world settings like robotics or industrial control systems, however, testing different hyperparameter configurations directly on the environment can be financially prohibitive, dangerous,...
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Fall 2021
The optimization of non-convex objective functions is a topic of central interest in machine learning. Remarkably, it has recently been shown that simple gradient-based optimization can achieve globally optimal solutions in important non-convex problems that arise in machine learning, including...
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On the Application of Continuous Deterministic Reinforcement Learning in Neural Architecture Search
DownloadSpring 2021
Architecture evaluation is a major bottleneck of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Recent trends have seen a shift in favor of weight-sharing networks capable of superimposing all possible candidate architectures in a search space. Nevertheless, this technique is not beyond reproach, and has...
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Fall 2021
Climate change concerns have raised awareness about the importance of decarbonizing the power sector. In achieving such a goal, energy storage is a critical operation that is currently done using mostly fossil fuels as chemical energy storage. The only viable alternative is battery energy storage...