Shimon Whiteson's Publications

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Generalized Domains for Empirical Evaluations in Reinforcement Learning

Shimon Whiteson, Brian Tanner, Matthew E. Taylor, and Peter Stone. Generalized Domains for Empirical Evaluations in Reinforcement Learning. In ICML 2009: Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Conference on Machine Learning: Workshop on Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning, June 2009.

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Abstract

Many empirical results in reinforcement learning are based on a very small set of environments. These results often represent the best algorithm parameters that were found after an ad-hoc tuning or fitting process. We argue that presenting tuned scores from a small set of environments leads to method overfitting, wherein results may not generalize to similar environments. To address this problem, we advocate empirical evaluations using generalized domains: parameterized problem generators that explicitly encode variations in the environment to which the learner should be robust. We argue that evaluating across a set of these generated problems offers a more meaningful evaluation of reinforcement learning algorithms.

BibTeX Entry

@InProceedings{whiteson:icml09,
  author       = "Shimon Whiteson and Brian Tanner and Matthew E. Taylor and Peter Stone",
  title	       = "Generalized Domains for Empirical Evaluations in Reinforcement Learning",
  booktitle    = "ICML 2009: Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International
                  Conference on Machine Learning: Workshop on Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning",
  month	       = "June",
  year	       = 2009,
}

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