Portrait de Doina Precup

Doina Precup

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeure agrégée, McGill University, École d'informatique
Chef d'équipe de recherche, Google DeepMind
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage automatique médical
Apprentissage par renforcement
Modèles probabilistes
Modélisation moléculaire
Raisonnement

Biographie

Doina Precup enseigne à l'Université McGill tout en menant des recherches fondamentales sur l'apprentissage par renforcement, notamment les applications de l'IA dans des domaines ayant des répercussions sociales, tels que les soins de santé. Elle s'intéresse à la prise de décision automatique dans des situations d'incertitude élevée.

Elle est membre de l'Institut canadien de recherches avancées (CIFAR) et de l'Association pour l'avancement de l'intelligence artificielle (AAAI), et dirige le bureau montréalais de DeepMind.

Ses spécialités sont les suivantes : intelligence artificielle, apprentissage machine, apprentissage par renforcement, raisonnement et planification sous incertitude, applications.

Étudiants actuels

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :

Publications

Deep learning, reinforcement learning, and world models
Yu Matsuo
Maneesh Sahani
David Silver
Masashi Sugiyama
Eiji Uchibe
J. Morimoto
Selective Credit Assignment
Diana Borsa
Hado Philip van Hasselt
Improving Sample Efficiency of Value Based Models Using Attention and Vision Transformers
Amir Ardalan Kalantari
Much of recent Deep Reinforcement Learning success is owed to the neural architecture's potential to learn and use effective internal repres… (voir plus)entations of the world. While many current algorithms access a simulator to train with a large amount of data, in realistic settings, including while playing games that may be played against people, collecting experience can be quite costly. In this paper, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning architecture whose purpose is to increase sample efficiency without sacrificing performance. We design this architecture by incorporating advances achieved in recent years in the field of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. Specifically, we propose a visually attentive model that uses transformers to learn a self-attention mechanism on the feature maps of the state representation, while simultaneously optimizing return. We demonstrate empirically that this architecture improves sample complexity for several Atari environments, while also achieving better performance in some of the games.
COptiDICE: Offline Constrained Reinforcement Learning via Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation
Jongmin Lee
Cosmin Paduraru
Daniel J Mankowitz
Nicolas Heess
Kee-Eung Kim
Arthur Guez
We consider the offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the agent aims to compute a policy that maximizes expected… (voir plus) return while satisfying given cost constraints, learning only from a pre-collected dataset. This problem setting is appealing in many real-world scenarios, where direct interaction with the environment is costly or risky, and where the resulting policy should comply with safety constraints. However, it is challenging to compute a policy that guarantees satisfying the cost constraints in the offline RL setting, since the off-policy evaluation inherently has an estimation error. In this paper, we present an offline constrained RL algorithm that optimizes the policy in the space of the stationary distribution. Our algorithm, COptiDICE, directly estimates the stationary distribution corrections of the optimal policy with respect to returns, while constraining the cost upper bound, with the goal of yielding a cost-conservative policy for actual constraint satisfaction. Experimental results show that COptiDICE attains better policies in terms of constraint satisfaction and return-maximization, outperforming baseline algorithms.
The Paradox of Choice: Using Attention in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Appendix: On the Expressivity of Markov Reward
David Abel
Will Dabney
Anna Harutyunyan
Mark K. Ho
Michael L. Littman
Satinder Singh
(Q1) What does it mean for Bob to *solve* one of these tasks? That is, if Alice chooses a SOAP, PO, or TO for Bob to learn to solve, when ca… (voir plus)n Alice determine Bob has solved the task? A: Bob can be said to be doing better on a given task if his behavior improves, as is typical in evaluating behavior under reward. The difference with SOAPs, POs, and TOs is that we measure improvement relative to the task rather than reward. For instance, given a SOAP, we might say that Bob has solved the task once he has found one of the good policies, and we might measure Bob’s progress on a task in terms of the distance of his greedy policy to one of the good policies (as done in our learning experiments). The same reasoning applies to POs and TOs: Bob is doing better on a task in so far as his greedy policy (or trajectories) is (are) higher up the ordering.
Behind the Machine's Gaze: Biologically Constrained Neural Networks Exhibit Human-like Visual Attention
B. Eskofier
Dario Zanca
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Low-Rank Representation of Reinforcement Learning Policies
We propose a general framework for policy representation for reinforcement learning tasks. This framework involves finding a low-dimensional… (voir plus) embedding of the policy on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The usage of RKHS based methods allows us to derive strong theoretical guarantees on the expected return of the reconstructed policy. Such guarantees are typically lacking in black-box models, but are very desirable in tasks requiring stability and convergence guarantees. We conduct several experiments on classic RL domains. The results confirm that the policies can be robustly represented in a low-dimensional space while the embedded policy incurs almost no decrease in returns.
Importance of Empirical Sample Complexity Analysis for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Single-Shot Pruning for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Riyasat Ohib
Sergey Plis
A Consciousness-Inspired Planning Agent for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
We present an end-to-end, model-based deep reinforcement learning agent which dynamically attends to relevant parts of its state during plan… (voir plus)ning. The agent uses a bottleneck mechanism over a set-based representation to force the number of entities to which the agent attends at each planning step to be small. In experiments, we investigate the bottleneck mechanism with several sets of customized environments featuring different challenges. We consistently observe that the design allows the planning agents to generalize their learned task-solving abilities in compatible unseen environments by attending to the relevant objects, leading to better out-of-distribution generalization performance.
Flexible Option Learning
Temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning (RL), offers the promise of improving generalization and knowledge transfer in complex enviro… (voir plus)nments, by propagating information more efficiently over time. Although option learning was initially formulated in a way that allows updating many options simultaneously, using off-policy, intra-option learning (Sutton, Precup & Singh, 1999), many of the recent hierarchical reinforcement learning approaches only update a single option at a time: the option currently executing. We revisit and extend intra-option learning in the context of deep reinforcement learning, in order to enable updating all options consistent with current primitive action choices, without introducing any additional estimates. Our method can therefore be naturally adopted in most hierarchical RL frameworks. When we combine our approach with the option-critic algorithm for option discovery, we obtain significant improvements in performance and data-efficiency across a wide variety of domains.