Doina Precup

Mohammad Sami Nur Islam Islam

Jesse Farebrother

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Marc Gendron-Bellemare

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Eilif Benjamin Muller

Doctorat - McGill

Doctorat - McGill

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Nazanin Mohammadi Sepahvand

Google Scholar

Arushi Jain

Doctorat - McGill

Doctorat - McGill

Postdoctorat - McGill

Google Scholar

Elaine Lau

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Jonathan Lebensold

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Baccalauréat - McGill

Ray Luo

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

G McCracken

Doctorat - McGill

Google Scholar

Doctorat - McGill

Shahrad Mohammadzadeh

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Gabriela Moisescu-Pareja

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Padideh Nouri

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Charles Onu

Doctorat - McGill

Doctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Nate Rahn

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Marc Gendron-Bellemare

Sahand Rezaei-Shoshtari

Doctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Blake Richards

samiemandana@gmail.com

Doctorat - McGill

Nishanth Anand Vemgal

Doctorat - McGill

Doctorat - McGill

Doctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Stagiaire de recherche - McGill

Steve Wen

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Gregory Dudek

Skipper : combiner l’abstraction spatiale et temporelle afin d’améliorer la généralisation

Zijing Wu

Doctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - McGill

Harry Zhao

Doctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Billets de blogue

Generic thumbnail for Mila Blog articles.

22 février 2024

par

Mingde Harry Zhao

Safa Alver

Harm van Seijen

Romain Laroche

Doina Precup

Yoshua Bengio

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Publications

Learning Successor Features the Simple Way

Raymond Chua

Arna Ghosh

Christos Kaplanis

Blake Richards

In Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is a challenge to learn representations that do not exhibit catastrophic forgetting or interference … (voir plus)in non-stationary environments. Successor Features (SFs) offer a potential solution to this challenge. However, canonical techniques for learning SFs from pixel-level observations often lead to representation collapse, wherein representations degenerate and fail to capture meaningful variations in the data. More recent methods for learning SFs can avoid representation collapse, but they often involve complex losses and multiple learning phases, reducing their efficiency. We introduce a novel, simple method for learning SFs directly from pixels. Our approach uses a combination of a Temporal-difference (TD) loss and a reward prediction loss, which together capture the basic mathematical definition of SFs. We show that our approach matches or outperforms existing SF learning techniques in both 2D (Minigrid), 3D (Miniworld) mazes and Mujoco, for both single and continual learning scenarios. As well, our technique is efficient, and can reach higher levels of performance in less time than other approaches. Our work provides a new, streamlined technique for learning SFs directly from pixel observations, with no pretraining required.

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Offline Multitask Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning

Haque Ishfaq

Thanh Nguyen-Tang

Songtao Feng

Raman Arora

Mengdi Wang

Ming Yin

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Parseval Regularization for Continual Reinforcement Learning

Wesley Chung

Lynn Cherif

David Meger

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

QGFN: Controllable Greediness with Action Values

Elaine Lau

Stephen Zhewen Lu

Ling Pan

Emmanuel Bengio

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets; GFNs) are a family of energy-based generative methods for combinatorial objects, capable of generating … (voir plus)diverse and high-utility samples. However, consistently biasing GFNs towards producing high-utility samples is non-trivial. In this work, we leverage connections between GFNs and reinforcement learning (RL) and propose to combine the GFN policy with an action-value estimate,

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

Aviral Kumar

Vincent Zhuang

Rishabh Agarwal

Yi Su

John D Co-Reyes

Avi Singh

Kate Baumli

Shariq N Iqbal

Colton Bishop

Rebecca Roelofs

Lei M Zhang

Kay McKinney

Disha Shrivastava

Cosmin Paduraru

George Tucker

Feryal Behbahani

Aleksandra Faust

Self-correction is a highly desirable capability of large language models (LLMs), yet it has consistently been found to be largely ineffecti… (voir plus)ve in modern LLMs. Current methods for training self-correction typically depend on either multiple models, a more advanced model, or additional forms of supervision. To address these shortcomings, we develop a multi-turn online reinforcement learning (RL) approach, SCoRe, that significantly improves an LLM's self-correction ability using entirely self-generated data. To build SCoRe, we first show that variants of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on offline model-generated correction traces are often insufficient for instilling self-correction behavior. In particular, we observe that training via SFT falls prey to either a distribution mismatch between mistakes made by the data-collection policy and the model's own responses, or to behavior collapse, where learning implicitly prefers only a certain mode of correction behavior that is often not effective at self-correction on test problems. SCoRe addresses these challenges by training under the model's own distribution of self-generated correction traces and using appropriate regularization to steer the learning process into learning a self-correction behavior that is effective at test time as opposed to fitting high-reward responses for a given prompt. This regularization process includes an initial phase of multi-turn RL on a base model to generate a policy initialization that is less susceptible to collapse, followed by using a reward bonus to amplify self-correction. With Gemini 1.0 Pro and 1.5 Flash models, we find that SCoRe achieves state-of-the-art self-correction performance, improving the base models' self-correction by 15.6% and 9.1% respectively on MATH and HumanEval.

2024-09-19

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

Aviral Kumar

Vincent Zhuang

Rishabh Agarwal

Yi Su

John D Co-Reyes

Avi Singh

Kate Baumli

Shariq N Iqbal

Colton Bishop

Rebecca Roelofs

Lei M Zhang

Kay McKinney

Disha Shrivastava

Cosmin Paduraru

George Tucker

Feryal Behbahani

Aleksandra Faust

2024-09-19

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

An Attentive Approach for Building Partial Reasoning Agents from Pixels

Safa Alver

We study the problem of building reasoning agents that are able to generalize in an effective manner. Towards this goal, we propose an end-t… (voir plus)o-end approach for building model-based reinforcement learning agents that dynamically focus their reasoning to the relevant aspects of the environment: after automatically identifying the distinct aspects of the environment, these agents dynamically filter out the relevant ones and then pass them to their simulator to perform partial reasoning. Unlike existing approaches, our approach works with pixel-based inputs and it allows for interpreting the focal points of the agent. Our quantitative analyses show that the proposed approach allows for effective generalization in high-dimensional domains with raw observational inputs. We also perform ablation analyses to validate our design choices. Finally, we demonstrate through qualitative analyses that our approach actually allows for building agents that focus their reasoning on the relevant aspects of the environment.

2024-09-17

TMLR (accepté)

An Attentive Approach for Building Partial Reasoning Agents from Pixels

Safa Alver

We study the problem of building reasoning agents that are able to generalize in an effective manner. Towards this goal, we propose an end-t… (voir plus)o-end approach for building model-based reinforcement learning agents that dynamically focus their reasoning to the relevant aspects of the environment: after automatically identifying the distinct aspects of the environment, these agents dynamically filter out the relevant ones and then pass them to their simulator to perform partial reasoning. Unlike existing approaches, our approach works with pixel-based inputs and it allows for interpreting the focal points of the agent. Our quantitative analyses show that the proposed approach allows for effective generalization in high-dimensional domains with raw observational inputs. We also perform ablation analyses to validate of design choices. Finally, we demonstrate through qualitative analyses that our approach actually allows for building agents that focus their reasoning on the relevant aspects of the environment.

2024-09-17

TMLR (accepté)

A Look at Value-Based Decision-Time vs. Background Planning Methods Across Different Settings

Safa Alver

In model-based reinforcement learning (RL), an agent can leverage a learned model to improve its way of behaving in different ways. Two of t… (voir plus)he prevalent ways to do this are through decision-time and background planning methods. In this study, we are interested in understanding how the value-based versions of these two planning methods will compare against each other across different settings. Towards this goal, we first consider the simplest instantiations of value-based decision-time and background planning methods and provide theoretical results on which one will perform better in the regular RL and transfer learning settings. Then, we consider the modern instantiations of them and provide hypotheses on which one will perform better in the same settings. Finally, we perform illustrative experiments to validate these theoretical results and hypotheses. Overall, our findings suggest that even though value-based versions of the two planning methods perform on par in their simplest instantiations, the modern instantiations of value-based decision-time planning methods can perform on par or better than the modern instantiations of value-based background planning methods in both the regular RL and transfer learning settings.

2024-08-01

EWRL/2024/Workshop (accepté)

The Heterophilic Graph Learning Handbook: Benchmarks, Models, Theoretical Analysis, Applications and Challenges

Sitao Luan

Chenqing Hua

Qincheng Lu

Liheng Ma

Lirong Wu

Xinyu Wang

Minkai Xu

Xiao-Wen Chang

Rex Ying

Stan Z. Li

Jian Tang

Guy Wolf

Stefanie Jegelka

Homophily principle, \ie{} nodes with the same labels or similar attributes are more likely to be connected, has been commonly believed to b… (voir plus)e the main reason for the superiority of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over traditional Neural Networks (NNs) on graph-structured data, especially on node-level tasks. However, recent work has identified a non-trivial set of datasets where GNN's performance compared to the NN's is not satisfactory. Heterophily, i.e. low homophily, has been considered the main cause of this empirical observation. People have begun to revisit and re-evaluate most existing graph models, including graph transformer and its variants, in the heterophily scenario across various kinds of graphs, e.g. heterogeneous graphs, temporal graphs and hypergraphs. Moreover, numerous graph-related applications are found to be closely related to the heterophily problem. In the past few years, considerable effort has been devoted to studying and addressing the heterophily issue. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the latest progress on heterophilic graph learning, including an extensive summary of benchmark datasets and evaluation of homophily metrics on synthetic graphs, meticulous classification of the most updated supervised and unsupervised learning methods, thorough digestion of the theoretical analysis on homophily/heterophily, and broad exploration of the heterophily-related applications. Notably, through detailed experiments, we are the first to categorize benchmark heterophilic datasets into three sub-categories: malignant, benign and ambiguous heterophily. Malignant and ambiguous datasets are identified as the real challenging datasets to test the effectiveness of new models on the heterophily challenge. Finally, we propose several challenges and future directions for heterophilic graph representation learning.

2024-07-12

ArXiv (prépublication)