We introduce the Adaptive Skills, Adaptive Partitions (ASAP) framework that (1) learns skills (i.e., temporally extended actions or options) as well as (2) where to apply them. We believe that both (1) and (2) are necessary for a truly general skill learning framework, which is a key building block needed to scale up t…
HiPPO adapts skills and higher-level policies together for better transfer in hierarchical RL.
problem Sub-optimality in skill transfer when lower-level skills are fixed.
method HiPPO: a novel hierarchical policy gradient method that trains all levels of the hierarchy jointly.
result Improved robustness of skills to environment changes through training time-abstractions.
Spaced repetition is among the most studied learning strategies in the cognitive science literature. It consists in temporally distributing exposure to an information so as to improve long-term memorization. Providing students with an adaptive and personalized distributed practice schedule would benefit more than just …
ABC method improves subseasonal weather forecasting by 60-90%.
problem Improving subseasonal temperature and precipitation forecasting accuracy.
method Combines dynamical forecasts with machine learning-based bias correction.
result Significant improvement in temperature and precipitation forecasting skills.
ReSkill reconciles RL skill creation with policy optimization.
problem RL policies lack reusable strategies across tasks.
method Integrates skill creation into RL loop with three mechanisms.
result Consistently outperforms existing methods, especially on unseen tasks.
The paper presents a method for personalized exercise recommendations that improves learner skill gain.
problem Adapting to individual needs in large, diverse groups of learners in digital environments.
method Contextual Thompson Sampling to select exercises that advance learner skill.
result The method recommends exercises associated with greater skill improvement and adapts to learner differences.
Robotics learns new skills faster by reusing past movements.
problem Learning new motor skills is time-consuming and requires exploration of a large space of motor configurations.
method Combines probabilistic movement primitives with relative entropy policy search for skill initialization and adaptation.
result Quality of learned skills improves and the number of required iterations to learn a new task can be reduced by more than 60%.
Integrates skills and world models for efficient task solving and transfer.
problem Quickly solve new tasks in complex environments using reusable knowledge.
method Leverages partial amortization for fast adaptation and online skill planning.
result Improved sample efficiency in single tasks and transfer between tasks.
Simulation-to-real transfer is an important strategy for making reinforcement learning practical with real robots. Successful sim-to-real transfer systems have difficulty producing policies which generalize across tasks, despite training for thousands of hours equivalent real robot time. To address this shortcoming, we…
Paper learns versatile balancing and recovery motions for humanoid robots.
problem Training humanoid robots to handle unexpected perturbations.
method Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning in a physics simulator.
result Learned skills comparable to preprogrammed controllers but more adaptable.
E-learning systems are capable of providing more adaptive and efficient learning experiences for students than the traditional classroom setting. A key component of such systems is the learning strategy, the algorithm that designs the learning paths for students based on information such as the students' current progre…
A study shows that a fine-tuned model's directional accuracy in financial forecasting is largely due to chance, not skill.
problem Misleading directional accuracy in financial forecasting models.
method A reproducible, frozen-data benchmark with paired significance tests to separate skill from base-rate artifact.
result Fine-tuned models do not show significant directional skill over a base rate of 70% in financial forecasting.
VarFA efficiently estimates student skill levels with uncertainty for adaptive testing.
problem Efficiently estimating student skill levels with uncertainty for adaptive testing.
method VarFA uses variational inference to extend factor analysis models for educational data.
result VarFA efficiently handles large datasets and produces uncertainty estimates.
Agents learn social skills from each other, improving performance.
problem Independent RL agents fail to use social learning.
method Imposed constraints, model-based auxiliary loss, mixed training.
result Agents trained with social learning outperform solo-trained agents.
Hierarchical MARL learns complementary skills for team coordination.
problem Creating intelligent agents that coordinate like human sports teams.
method Two-level hierarchical MARL with unsupervised skill discovery.
result Emergence of useful and complementary skills in team games.
Employers actively look for talents having not only specific hard skills but also various soft skills. To analyze the soft skill demands on the job market, it is important to be able to detect soft skill phrases from job advertisements automatically. However, a naive matching of soft skill phrases can lead to false pos…
When recruiting job candidates, employers rarely observe their underlying skill level directly. Instead, they must administer a series of interviews and/or collate other noisy signals in order to estimate the worker's skill. Traditional economics papers address screening models where employers access worker skill via a…
Risk and uncertainty will always be a matter of experience, luck, skills, and modelling. Leverage is another concept, which is critical for the investor decisions and results. Adaptive skills and quantitative probabilistic methods need to be used in successful management of risk, uncertainty and leverage. The author ex…
Bayesian nonparametrics enables dynamic skill discovery from expert data.
problem Fixed K for offline skill discovery in reinforcement learning.
method Variational inference, continuous relaxations, Bayesian nonparametrics.
result Nonparametric model with dynamically-changing number of options.
Paper learns skill distributions from game outcomes, proving minimax optimality.
problem Learning skill distributions from noisy pairwise game outcomes.
method Proposes a simple algorithm using kernel density estimation and minimax techniques.
result Near-optimal minimax mean squared error scaling for skill density estimation.
We present a novel solution to the problem of simulation-to-real transfer, which builds on recent advances in robot skill decomposition. Rather than focusing on minimizing the simulation-reality gap, we learn a set of diverse policies that are parameterized in a way that makes them easily reusable. This diversity and p…
Proposes a new method to prevent forgetting in neural networks.
problem Catastrophic forgetting in neural networks.
method Total absolute signal passing through each connection.
result Simpler and closer to brain processes.
Deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated increasing capabilities for continuous control problems, including agents that can move with skill and agility through their environment. An open problem in this setting is that of developing good strategies for integrating or merging policies for multiple skills, where each…
The study shows how modular learning can adapt to new tasks.
problem Adapting to new tasks in an ever-changing environment.
method Task segmentation, modular learning, memory-based ensembling.
result The system demonstrates robustness to catastrophic forgetting and increasing positive transfer.
The paper explains how language models acquire complex skills through scaling laws and statistical analysis.
problem Understanding how language models acquire new skills as their size and training data increase.
method Statistical framework and mathematical analysis of scaling laws.
result Language models can learn complex skills efficiently due to a strong inductive bias.
This work proposes a RL approach to learn versatile robotic manipulation tasks.
problem Challenging manipulation tasks in robotics and vision.
method Reinforcement learning (RL) to combine primitive skills, no intermediate rewards, few demonstrations, and efficient skill learning.
result Versatile robotic manipulation in challenging settings with temporary occlusions and dynamic scene changes.
Convolutional neural networks improve surgical skill evaluation.
problem Manual feedback from senior surgeons is laborious, expensive, and subjective.
method Fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for classifying and regressing surgical skills.
result Deep neural networks achieve competitive performance on JIGSAWS dataset.
Researchers study how skills are learned in neural networks using physics principles.
problem Understanding how skills are sequentially learned in neural networks.
method Abstract and simplify the problem using physics principles, proposing three models: Geometry, Resource, and Domino.
result Models reveal insights into neural scaling laws, learning dynamics, and the benefits of modularity.
The paper examines skill estimation and variance under model misspecification in IRT.
problem Underestimation and overestimation of skills when non-compensatory model is misspecified as compensatory.
method Theoretical approach to analyze underestimation and overestimation of skills and variance.
result Overestimation of skills occurs around the origin and asymptotic variance differs under model misspecification.
Humans are able to perform a myriad of sophisticated tasks by drawing upon skills acquired through prior experience. For autonomous agents to have this capability, they must be able to extract reusable skills from past experience that can be recombined in new ways for subsequent tasks. Furthermore, when controlling com…
Robot learns to imitate human interactions through deep learning.
problem Teaching robots to coordinate actions with human partners.
method Deep learning framework for motion embedding, prediction, and trajectory generation.
result Importance of predictive and adaptive components for successful imitation.
DSE learns transferable skills across changing dynamics and goals.
problem Learning transferable skills across different reinforcement learning tasks.
method Variational inference for multi-task reinforcement learning with shared and task-specific latent spaces.
result Policies can generalize to unseen dynamics and goals conditions.
A planning approach learns skills from interactions, balancing exploration and exploitation.
problem Learning robust high-level skills in noisy environments with unknown pre-conditions.
method Formulates skills as high-level policies, learns plans via bandit problems, balances exploration and exploitation.
result A planner capable of learning robust high-level skills in high-dimensional state spaces.
DADS discovers skills with predictable outcomes from unlabeled data.
problem Learning accurate models for complex dynamical systems is difficult and often doesn't generalize well.
method Dynamics-Aware Discovery of Skills (DADS) combines model-based and model-free learning.
result DADS discovers infinitely many behaviors in high-dimensional state-spaces.
New algorithm trains neural nets on simple skills to learn complex tasks faster.
problem Learning complex tasks through simple imitation.
method Train neural networks on simple, easy-to-learn skills to accelerate learning of complex, hard-to-learn tasks.
result Consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline in training speed and performance.
EDL discovers state-covering skills without relying on task rewards.
problem Discovering skills in reinforcement learning without a task-oriented reward function.
method EDL optimizes information-theoretic objective using different machinery to address coverage problem.
result EDL discovers state-covering skills more effectively than existing methods.
Sloth predicts LLM performance using latent skills across families.
problem Variations in benchmark performance due to differences in training configurations and data processing across model families.
method Sloth uses publicly available benchmark data and assumes LLM performance is driven by latent skills influenced by model size and training tokens. It exploits correlations across benchmarks to provide accurate predictions.
result Sloth predicts LLM performance accurately and offers insights into scaling behaviors for complex tasks.
Paper tackles skill transfer in RL for morphologically different agents.
problem Transfer skills between morphologically different reinforcement learning agents.
method Proposes a paired variational encoder-decoder model (PVED) for subspace learning.
result Demonstrates improved skill transfer efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods.
New methods for skill rating in sports using state-space models.
problem Improving skill rating in competitive sports.
method State-space models, sequential Monte Carlo, discrete hidden Markov models.
result Advantages of state-space models for time-varying player skills.
We introduce a method for constructing skills capable of solving tasks drawn from a distribution of parameterized reinforcement learning problems. The method draws example tasks from a distribution of interest and uses the corresponding learned policies to estimate the topology of the lower-dimensional piecewise-smooth…
For robots to coexist with humans in a social world like ours, it is crucial that they possess human-like social interaction skills. Programming a robot to possess such skills is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Deep Q-Network (MDQN) to enable a robot to learn human-like interaction skills thr…
New method boosts skill learning by encouraging optimistic exploration.
problem Intrinsic reward for exploration is inherently pessimistic.
method Derive an information gain auxiliary objective involving an ensemble of discriminators and rewarding policy disagreement.
result Improves skill learning in grid worlds and Atari games.
Generative model emulates climate model for 100-year forecasts.
problem Challenges in accurately simulating long-term climate data.
method Integrates DYffusion with SFNO for stable, accurate climate simulations.
result Achieves near gold-standard performance for climate model emulation.
This paper combines and improves probabilistic forecasts of wind speeds using advanced statistical methods.
problem Improving accuracy and reliability of probabilistic forecasts in wind speed prediction.
method Adapting prediction with expert advice theory to probabilistic forecasts, combining raw or post-processed ensembles, and using CRPS and Jolliffe-Primo tests.
result Combining probabilistic forecasts can lead to more reliable and skillful predictions, as shown by the Jolliffe-Primo test.
We consider worker skill estimation for the single-coin Dawid-Skene crowdsourcing model. In practice, skill-estimation is challenging because worker assignments are sparse and irregular due to the arbitrary and uncontrolled availability of workers. We formulate skill estimation as a rank-one correlation-matrix completi…
Smartphone app counts grapes for accurate yield estimation.
problem Accurate yield estimation at minimal cost.
method Adapted Deep Learning algorithms for crowd counting to fruit counting.
result Demonstrated smartphone app for grape yield estimation.
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are among the most played digital games in the world. In these games, teams of players fight against each other in arena environments, and the gameplay is focused on tactical combat. Mastering MOBAs requires extensive practice, as is exemplified in the popular MOBA Defence o…
New method automates asymmetric choice for better skill transfer in reinforcement learning.
problem Improving sample efficiency and transferability of reinforcement learning agents.
method Attentive Priors for Expressive and Transferable Skills (APES) using hierarchical KL-regularization.
result APES automates asymmetric choice, leading to better skill transfer across sequential tasks.