UTCS Reinforcement Learning Reading Group

The UTCS Reinforcement Learning Reading Group is a student run group that discusses research papers related to reinforcement learning. Ever since its first meeting in the spring of 2004, the group has served as a forum for students to discuss interesting research ideas in an informal setting. Meetings are usually held in the afternoon and refreshments are provided. Occasionally, the group hosts invited talks. The group was coordinated during the period Spring 2004 - Fall 2005 by Matt Taylor. Currently, it is managed by Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan.

This page provides information about group meetings. Also, it lists useful resources for reinforcement learning, and serves as a repository of all past readings.

New members are always welcome! Interested students or researchers may also subscribe to the group e-mailing list.

Meeting Time and Place

Next Meeting

Communication

• To subscribe to the list or to unsubscribe from it, send your request through e-mail to shivaram@cs.utexas.edu.
• To send e-mail to the list, address rlreadinggroup@utlists.utexas.edu.

Reinforcement Learning Resources

• Textbook by Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction.
• Rich Sutton's Winter 2007 course at the University of Alberta: Reinforcement Learning in Artificial Intelligence.
• Peter Stone's Fall 2007 course at the University of Texas: Reinforcement Learning: Theory and Practice.
• Balaraman Ravindran's Fall 2006 Course at IIT Madras: Reinforcement Learning.
• Michael Littman's Spring 2004 course at Rutgers University: Learning and Sequential Decision Making.

Suggested Readings for Future Meetings

• Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning
  Brian Ziebart, Andrew Maas, J. Andrew Bagnell and Anind Dey, 2008
  Suggestion from Peter Stone and Kurt Dresner.

Paper Readings and Talks (Reverse Chronological Order)

Summer 2008

• Planning and Learning in Environments with Delayed Feedback
  Thomas Walsh, Ali Nouri, Lihong Li and Michael Littman, 2007
  Discussion led by Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, June 20, 2008.
• Adaptive Treatment of Epilepsy via Batch-mode Reinforcement Learning
  Arthur Guez, Robert Vincent, Massimo Avoli and Joelle Pineau, 2008
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, May 30, 2008.

Spring 2008

• Perspectives on Reinforcement Learning: Group Discussion
  Discussion led by Michael Quinlan, April 25, 2008.
  
• Decentralized Control of Cooperative Systems: Categorization and Complexity Analysis
  Claudia Goldman and Shlomo Zilberstein, 2004
  Discussion led by Doran Chakraborty, April 11, 2008.
• Planning with Durative Actions in Stochastic Domains
  Mausam and Daniel Weld, 2007
  Discussion led by Doran Chakraborty, April 4, 2008.
• Fourteen Declarative Principles for an Integrative Science of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning
  Rich Sutton, 2008
  Discussion led by Todd Hester, March 21, 2008.
• Factor-Guided Motion Planning for a Robot Arm
  Jaesik Choi and Eyal Amir, 2007
  Discussion led by Michael Quinlan, February 29, 2008.
  Invited Speaker: Eyal Amir.
• Learning to Play Using Low-Complexity Rule-Based Policies: Illustrations through Ms. Pac-Man
  István Szita and András Lőrincz, 2007
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, February 15, 2008.
• A Natural Policy Gradient
  Sham Kakade, 2002
  Discussion led by Andrew Dreher, January 25, 2008.

Fall 2007

• ICML-07 Tutorial on Bayesian Methods for Reinforcement Learning, Part 4
  Pascal Poupart, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh and Yaakov Engel, 2007
  Reinforcement learning with Gaussian processes
  Yaakov Engel, Shie Mannor and Ron Meir, 2005
  Discussion led by Joe Reisinger, December 7, 2007.
• ICML-07 Tutorial on Bayesian Methods for Reinforcement Learning, Parts 1, 2, 3
  Pascal Poupart, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh and Yaakov Engel, 2007
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, November 30, 2007.
• Constructing Basis Functions from Directed Graphs for Value Function Approximation
  Jeff Johns and Sridhar Mahadevan, 2007
  Proto-Value Functions: A Laplacian Framework for Learning Representation and Control in Markov Decision Processes
  Sridhar Mahadevan and Mauro Maggioni, 2007
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, November 16, 2007.
• The Dynamics of Reinforcement Learning in Cooperative Multiagent Systems
  Caroline Claus and Craig Boutilier, 1998
  Discussion led by Doran Chakraborty, November 9, 2007.
• A new mathematical framework for optimal choice of actions
  Emanuel Todorov, 2007
  Discussion led by Ian Fasel and Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, October 12, 2007.
• Combining Online and Offline Knowledge in UCT
  Sylvain Gelly and David Silver, 2007
  Discussion led by Joe Reisinger, September 21, 2007.
• Dynamic Positioning in 3D RoboCup Soccer
  Presentation by Sahar Asadi, September 7, 2007.

Summer 2007

• Dirichlet Process Mixtures
  Khalid El-Arini, 2005
  A Bayesian Framework for Reinforcement Learning
  Malcolm Strens, 2000
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, June 29, 2007.
• Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning: A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach
  Aaron Wilson, Alan Fern, Soumya Ray and Prasad Tadepalli, 2007
  Discussion led by Todd Hester, June 15, 2007.
• Nash Q-Learning for General-Sum Stochastic Games
  Junling Hu and Michael Wellman, 2003
  Discussion led by Shimon Whiteson, June 8, 2007.
• Thresholded Rewards: Acting Optimally in Timed, Zero-Sum Games
  Colin McMillen and Manuela Veloso, 2007
  Discussion led by Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, June 1, 2007.
• Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Relocatable Action Models
  Bethany Leffler, Michael Littman and Timothy Edmunds, 2007
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, May 25, 2007.

Spring 2007

• Adaptive Representations for Reinforcement Learning
  Shimon Whiteson, 2007
  Ph.D. defense by Shimon Whiteson, April 20, 2007.
• Integrating Guidance into Relational Reinforcement Learning
  Kurt Driessens and Sašo Džeroski, 2004
  Discussion led by Andrew Dreher, April 6, 2007.
• Online Learning and Exploiting Relational Models in Reinforcement Learning
  Tom Croonenborghs, Jan Ramon, Hendrick Blockeel and Maurice Bruynooghe, 2007
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, March 23, 2007.
• State Similarity Based Approach for Improving Performance in RL
  Sertan Girgin, Faruk Polat and Reda Alhajj, 2007
  Discussion led by Todd Hester, March 9, 2007.
• Deictic Option Schemas
  Balaraman Ravindran, Andrew Barto And Vimal Mathew, 2007
  Discussion led by Rahul Iyer, March 2, 2007.
• Bayesian Q-learning
  Richard Dearden, Nir Friedman and Stuart Russell, 1998
  Discussion led by David Pardoe, February 9, 2007.
• An Intrinsic Reward Mechanism for Efficient Exploration
  Özgür Şimşek and Andrew Barto, 2006
  Discussion led by Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, January 26, 2007.

Fall 2006

• Decision Tree Methods for Finding Reusable MDP Homomorphisms
  Alicia Wolfe and Andrew Barto, 2006
  Discussion led by Rahul Iyer, December 4, 2006.
• Robot planning in partially observable continuous domains
  Josep Porta, Matthijs Spaan and Nikos Vlassis, 2005
  Discussion led by Igor Karpov, November 20, 2006.
• Reinforcement Learning in POMDP's via Direct Gradient Ascent
  Jonathan Baxter and Peter Bartlett, 2000
  Discussion led by Yaxin Liu, November 6, 2006.
• Reinforcement Learning for Optimized Trade Execution
  Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Yi Feng and Michael Kearns, 2006
  Discussion led by Andrew Dreher, October 23, 2006.
• Looping Suffix Tree-Based Inference of Partially Observable Hidden State
  Michael Holmes and Charles Isbell, Jr., 2006
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, October 9, 2006.
• Sparse Cooperative Q-learning
  Jelle Kok and Nikos Vlassis, 2004
  Discussion led by Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, September 25, 2006.
• Using Homomorphisms to Transfer Options across Continuous Reinforcement Learning Domains
  Vishal Soni and Satinder Singh, 2006
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, September 11, 2006.

Summer 2006

• PAC Model-Free Reinforcement Learning
  Alexander Strehl, Lihong Li, Eric Wiewiora, John Langford and Michael Littman, 2006
  Discussion led by Shimon Whiteson, August 15, 2006.

Spring 2006

• State Space Reduction for Autonomous Reinforcement Learning
  Mehran Asadi and Manfred Huber, 2004
  Accelerating Action Dependent Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Through Autonomous Subgoal Discovery
  Mehran Asadi and Manfred Huber, 2005
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, April 28, 2006.
• Autonomous Helicopter Flight via Reinforcement Learning
  Andrew Ng, H. Jin Kim, Michael Jordan and Shankar Sastry, 2004
  Discussion led by Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, April 14, 2006.
• Policy Gradient Methods for Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation
  Richard Sutton, David McAllester, Satinder Singh and Yishay Mansour, 2000
  Discussion led by Shimon Whiteson, March 31, 2006.
• Building Portable Options: Skill Transfer in Reinforcement Learning
  George Konidaris and Andrew Barto, 2006
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, March 10, 2006.
• CBR for State Value Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning
  Thomas Gabel and Martin Riedmiller, 2005
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, February 24, 2006.
• Why (PO)MDPs Lose for Spatial Tasks and What to Do About It
  Terran Lane and William Smart, 2005
  Discussion led by Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, February 10, 2006.
• Temporal-Difference Networks
  Richard Sutton and Brian Tanner, 2005
  Discussion led by Bikram Banerjee, January 27, 2006.

Fall 2005

• Developing navigation behavior through self-organizing distinctive state abstraction
  Jefferson Provost, Benjamin Kuipers and Risto Miikkulainen, 2006
  Discussion led by Jeff Provost, December 14, 2005.
• An Algorithmic Description of XCS
  Martin Butz and Stewart Wilson, 2000
  Discussion led by David Pardoe, December 2, 2005.
• Neural Fitted Q Iteration - First Experiences with a Data Efficient Neural Reinforcement Learning Method
  Martin Riedmiller, 2005
  A Direct Adaptive Method for Faster Backpropagation Learning: The RPROP Algorithm
  Martin Riedmiller and Heinrich Braun, 1993
  Discussion led by Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, November 18, 2005.
• The Parti-game Algorithm for Variable Resolution Reinforcement Learning in Multidimensional State Spaces
  Andrew Moore and Christopher Atkeson, 1995
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, November 4, 2005.
• Samuel Meets Amarel: Automating Value Function Approximation using Global State Space Analysis
  Sridhar Mahadevan, 2005
  Discussion led by Jeff Provost, October 14, 2005.
• Near-Optimal Reinforcement Learning in Polynomial Time
  Michael Kearns and Satinder Singh, 1998
  Discussion led by Yaxin Liu, September 23, 2005.

Summer 2005

• An Empirical Evaluation of Interval Estimation for Markov Decision Processes
  Alexander Strehl and Michael Littman, 2004
  Discussion led by Shimon Whiteson, August 26, 2005.
• Using Advice to Transfer Knowledge Acquired in One Reinforcement Learning Task to Another
  Lisa Torrey, Trevor Walker, Jude Shavlik and Richard Maclin, 2005
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, August 12, 2005.
• Guiding Inference through Relational Reinforcement Learning
  Nima Asgharbyegi, Negin Nejati, Pat Langley and Sachiyo Arai, 2005
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, June 17, 2005.
• Least-Squares Policy Iteration
  Michail Lagoudakis and Ronald Parr, 2003
  Discussion led by Lily Mihalkova, May 27, 2005.
• Relational Reinforcement Learning
  Sašo Džeroski, Luc De Raedt and Kurt Driessens, 2001
  Discussion led by Greg Kuhlmann, May 6, 2005.

Spring 2005

• Intrinsically Motivated Reinforcement Learning
  Satinder Singh, Andrew Barto and Nuttapong Chentanez, 2005
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, April 22, 2005.
• Gradient Descent for General Reinforcement Learning
  Leemon Baird and Andrew Moore, 1999
  Discussion led by Shimon Whiteson, April 8, 2005.
• Accelerating Reinforcement Learning by Composing Solutions of Automatically Identified Subtasks
  Chris Drummond, 2002
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, March 25, 2005.
• A Sparse Sampling Algorithm for Near-Optimal Planning in Large Markov Decision Processes
  Michael Kearns, Yishay Mansour and Andrew Ng, 2001
  Discussion led by David Pardoe, March 4, 2005.
• No Free Lunch Theorems for Optimization
  David Wolpert and William Macready, 1996
  Discussion led by Shimon Whiteson, February 18, 2005.
• Common myths and misstatements about reinforcement learning
  Various Authors, 1999 onwards
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, February 4, 2005.

Fall 2004

• Reinforcement Learning as Classification: Leveraging Modern Classifiers
  Michail Lagoudakis and Ronald Parr, 2003
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, November 29, 2004.
• Discovering Hierarchy in Reinforcement Learning with HEXQ
  Bernhard Hengst, 2002
  Discussion led by Mazda Ahmadi, 15 November, 2004.
• Synthesizing Policy Search and Temporal Difference Methods for Reinforcement Learning
  Discussion led by Shimon Whiteson , November 1, 2004.
• Implicit Negotiation in Repeated Games
  Michael Littman and Peter Stone, 2001
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, October 25, 2004.
• Markov Games as a Framework for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
  Michael Littman, 1994
  Discussion led by David Pardoe, October 11, 2004.
• RL Methodology
  Discussion led by Lily Mihalkova, September 20, 2004.

Summer 2004

• Three Automated Stock-Trading Agents: A Comparative Study
  Alexander Sherstov and Peter Stone, 2004
  Practice talk by Sasha Sherstov, July 9, 2004.
  Bidding for Customer Orders in TAC SCM
  David Pardoe and Peter Stone, 2004
  Practice talk by David Pardoe, July 9, 2004.
• The MAXQ Method for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
  Thomas Dietterich, 1998
  Reinforcement Learning: A Survey, Section 6
  Leslie Kaelbling, Michael Littman and Andrew Moore, 1996
  Discussion led by Jeff Provost.
• Acting Optimally in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains
  Anthony Cassandra, Leslie Kaelbling and Michael Littman, 1994
  Discussion led by Shimon Whiteson, June 11, 2004.
• Reinforcement Learning: A Survey, Sections 4 and 5
  Leslie Kaelbling, Michael Littman and Andrew Moore, 1996
  Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, Chapter 9
  Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto, 1998
  Discussion on Model free and model based learning led by Peggy Fidelman, May 29, 2004.
• Residual Algorithms: Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation
  Leemon Baird, 1995
  Discussion led by Lily Mihalkova, May 14, 2004.

Spring 2004

• A Quantitative Study of Hypothesis Selection
  Philip Fong, 1995
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, April 23, 2004.
• Machine Learning for Fast Quadrupedal Locomotion
  Nate Kohl and Peter Stone, 2004
  Practice Talk by Nate Kohl, April 16, 2004.
• Policy invariance under reward transformations: Theory and application to reward shaping
  Andrew Ng, Daishi Harada and Stuart Russell, 1999
  Discussion led by Greg Kuhlmann, April 9, 2004.
• Reinforcement Learning with Replacing Eligibility Traces
  Satinder Singh and Richard Sutton, 1996
  Discussion led by David Pardoe, March 26, 2004.
• Learning to Predict by the Methods of Temporal Differences
  Richard Sutton, 1998
  Discussion led by Sasha Sherstov, March 5, 2004.
• On the Complexity of Solving Markov Decision Problems
  Michael Littman, Thomas Dean and Leslie Kaelbling, 1995
  Discussion led by Matt Taylor, February 20, 2004.
• Experiments with Reinforcement Learning in Problems with Continuous State and Action Spaces
  Juan Santamaría, Richard Sutton and Ashwin Ram, 1998
  Discussion led by Nick Jong, February 6, 2004.
• Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
  Leslie Kaelbling, Michael Littman and Andrew Moore, 1996
  General background discussion, January 23, 2004.