You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

Facebook would like to have computer science faculty in AI committed to work 80% of their time in industrial jobs and 20% of their time at their university. They call this scheme “co-employment” or “dual... Continue

An Outsider's Tour of Reinforcement Learning

Continue

Towards Actionable Intelligence

I’m going to close my outsider’s tour of Reinforcement Learning by announcing the release of a short survey of RL that coalesces my views from the perspectives of continuous control. Though the RL and controls... Continue

Coarse-ID Control

This is the thirteenth part of “An Outsider’s Tour of Reinforcement Learning.” Part 14 is here. Part 12 is here. Part 1 is here. Can poor models be used in control loops and still achieve... Continue

Lost Horizons

This is the twelfth part of “An Outsider’s Tour of Reinforcement Learning.” Part 13 is here. Part 11 is here. Part 1 is here. This series began by describing a view of reinforcement learning as... Continue

Catching Signals That Sound in the Dark

This is the eleventh part of “An Outsider’s Tour of Reinforcement Learning.” Part 12 is here. Part 10 is here. Part 1 is here. The essence of reinforcement learning is using past data to enhance... Continue

The Best Things in Life Are Model Free

This is the tenth part of “An Outsider’s Tour of Reinforcement Learning.” Part 11 is here. Part 9 is here. Part 1 is here. Though I’ve spent the last few posts casting shade at model-free... Continue

The Ethics of Reward Shaping

I read three great articles over the weekend by Renee DiResta, Chris Wiggins, and Janelle Shane that touched on a topic that’s been troubling me: In machine learning, we take our cost functions for granted,... Continue

Benchmarking Machine Learning with Performance Profiles

A common sticking point in contemporary reinforcement learning is how to evaluate performance on benchmarks. For a general purpose method, we’d like to demonstrate aptitude on a wide selection of test problems with minimal special... Continue

Clues for Which I Search and Choose

This is the ninth part of “An Outsider’s Tour of Reinforcement Learning.” Part 10 is here. Part 8 is here. Part 1 is here. Before we leave these model-free chronicles behind, let me turn to... Continue