Work

Alternating Optimisation and Quadrature for Robust Control

Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Bayesian optimisation has been successfully applied to a variety of reinforcement learning problems. However, the traditional approach for learning optimal policies in simulators does not utilise the opportunity to improve learning by adjusting certain environment variables: state features that are unobservable and randomly determined by the environment in a physical setting but are controllable in a simulator. This paper considers the problem of finding a robust policy while taking into account the impact of environment variables. We present Alternating Optimisation and Quadrature (ALOQ), which uses Bayesian optimisation and Bayesian quadrature to address such settings. ALOQ is robust to the presence of significant rare events, which may not be observable under random sampling, but play a substantial role in determining the optimal policy. Experimental results across different domains show that ALOQ can learn more efficiently and robustly than existing methods.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2964061343
FWCI: 1.444
Cites: 30
Cited by: 16
Related to: 10