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Fall 2023

Janjua, Muhammad Kamran

We study the use of reinforcement-learning based prediction approaches for a real drinking-water treatment plant. Developing such a prediction system is a critical step on the path to optimizing and automating water treatment. Before that, there are many questions to answer about predictability...

Fall 2024

Imani, Ehsan

Classical wisdom in machine learning advises controlling the complexity of the hypothesis space for achieving good generalization. Despite this, modern overparametrized neural networks demonstrate remarkably high generalization performance, oftentimes with larger and more expressive architectures...

Spring 2020

Zaheer, Muhammad

In model-based reinforcement learning, planning with an imperfect model of the environment has the potential to harm learning progress. But even when a model is imperfect, it may still contain information that is useful for planning. In this thesis, we investigate the idea of using an imperfect...

Fall 2020

Sokota, Samuel

For artificially intelligent learning systems to be deployed widely in real-world settings, it is important that they be able to operate decentrally. Unfortunately, decentralized control is challenging. Even finding approximately optimal joint policies of decentralized partially observable Markov...

Fall 2021

Banman, Kirby

Most convergence guarantees for stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDm) rely on independently and identically ditributed (iid) data sampling. Yet, SGDm is often used outside this regime, in settings with temporally correlated inputs such as continual learning and reinforcement learning....

Fall 2021

Gupta, Dhawal

Structural credit assignment in neural networks is a long-standing problem, with a variety of alternatives to backpropagation proposed to allow for local training of nodes. One of the early strategies was to treat each node as an agent and use a reinforcement learning method called REINFORCE to...

Spring 2024

Liu, Vincent

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) involves learning policies from datasets, rather than online interaction. The dissertation first investigates a critical component in offline RL: offline policy selection (OPS). Given that most offline RL algorithms require careful hyperparameter tuning, we...

Spring 2024

Wahab, Abdul

Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be learned by estimating a value function on reward bonuses,...

Fall 2019

Jacobsen, Andrew

In this thesis, we investigate different vector step-size adaptation approaches for continual, online prediction problems. Vanilla stochastic gradient descent can be considerably improved by scaling the update with a vector of appropriately chosen step-sizes. Many methods, including AdaGrad,...

Fall 2023

Silva, Hugo Luis A

Oftentimes, machine learning applications using neural networks involve solving discrete optimization problems, such as in pruning, parameter-isolation-based continual learning and training of binary networks. Still, these discrete problems are combinatorial in nature and are also not amenable to...