Mathematics, Systems and Robotics Seminar 

09/03/2007, 15:00 — 16:00 — Room P10, Mathematics Building
Francisco Melo, IST/ISR

Reinforcement learning: general overview and some interesting challenges

Reinforcement learning is a framework used to address the general problem of an agent faced with a sequential decision problem and using evaluative feedback as a performance measure. In this talk I will briefly review this topic of research. I will describe the standard framework of Markov decision processes and some classical solution methods (dynamic programming methods and stochastic approximation methods). I will then go through some more recent results and describe some important open issues in this area.