Reinforcement Learning Algorithms: Analysis and Applications

Prediction Error and Actor-Critic Hypotheses in the Brain.-  Reviewing on-policy / o -policy critic learning in the context of Temporal Di erences and Residual Learning.- Reward Function Design in Reinforcement Learning.- Exploration Methods In Sparse Reward Environments.- A Survey on Constraining Policy Updates Using the KL Divergence.- Fisher Information Approximations in Policy Gradient Methods.- Benchmarking the Natural gradient in Policy Gradient Methods and Evolution Strategies.- Information-Loss-Bounded Policy Optimization.- Persistent Homology for Dimensionality Reduction.- Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning - Algorithms and Applications.- Actor vs Critic.- Bring Color to Deep Q-Networks.- Distributed Methods for Reinforcement Learning.- Model-Based Reinforcement Learning.- Challenges of Model Predictive Control in a Black Box Environment.- Control as Inference?

Boris Belousov is a Ph.D. student at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, advised by Prof. Jan Peters. He received his M.Sc. degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2016, supported by a DAAD scholarship for academic excellence. Boris is now working toward combining optimal control and information theory with applications to robotics and reinforcement learning.

Hany Abdulsamad is a Ph.D. student at the TU Darmstadt, Germany. He graduated with a Master's degree in Automation and Control from the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the TU Darmstadt. His research interests range from optimal control and trajectory optimization to reinforcement learning and robotics. Hany's current research focuses on learning hierarchical structures for system identification and control. After graduating with a Master's degree in Autonomous Systems from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Pascal Klink pursued his Ph.D. studies at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group of the TU Darmstadt, where he developed methods for reinforcement learning in unstructured, partially observable real-world environments. Currently, he is investigating curriculum learning methods and how to use them to facilitate learning in these environments.