Portrait of Joseph Viviano

Joseph Viviano

joseph.viviano@mila.quebec
Machine Learning Scientist, Scientific Direction
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Publications

Action Abstractions for Amortized Sampling
Oussama Boussif
Lena Nehale Ezzine
Joseph Viviano
Michał Koziarski
Moksh Jain
Nikolay Malkin
Emmanuel Bengio
Rim Assouel
Yoshua Bengio
As trajectories sampled by policies used by reinforcement learning (RL) and generative flow networks (GFlowNets) grow longer, credit assignm… (see more)ent and exploration become more challenging, and the long planning horizon hinders mode discovery and generalization. The challenge is particularly pronounced in entropy-seeking RL methods, such as generative flow networks, where the agent must learn to sample from a structured distribution and discover multiple high-reward states, each of which take many steps to reach. To tackle this challenge, we propose an approach to incorporate the discovery of action abstractions, or high-level actions, into the policy optimization process. Our approach involves iteratively extracting action subsequences commonly used across many high-reward trajectories and `chunking' them into a single action that is added to the action space. In empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world environments, our approach demonstrates improved sample efficiency performance in discovering diverse high-reward objects, especially on harder exploration problems. We also observe that the abstracted high-order actions are interpretable, capturing the latent structure of the reward landscape of the action space. This work provides a cognitively motivated approach to action abstraction in RL and is the first demonstration of hierarchical planning in amortized sequential sampling.
2025-01-21
ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net