Approximate Reinforcement Learning

Fully autonomous agents that interact with the environment (like humans and robots) present challenges very different from classic machine learning. The agent must balance future benefits of actions against their costs without the advantage of a teacher or prior knowledge of the environment. In addition costs may not only include the expected benefits (or rewards), but may well be formulated as a trade-off between different objectives (for example: rewards vs. risk).
Exact solutions in the field of Reinforcement Learning scale badly with the task's complexity and are rarely applicable in practice. To close the gap between theory and reality, this project aims for approximate solutions that not only make favourable decisions but also avoid irrational behaviour or dead ends. The approximation's highly adaptive nature allows a direct application onto the agent's sensor data and therefore a full sensor-actor control loop. Newly developed algorithms are tested in simulations and on robotic systems. Reinforcement and reward-based learning is also investigated in the context of understanding and modeling human decision making. For details see "Research" page "Perception and Decision Making in Uncertain Environments".


Acknowledgements: Research is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Human-Centric Communication Cluster (H-C3) and Technische Universität Berlin.