Alexander Novikov

Maxim Rakhuba, Alexander Novikov, Ivan Oseledets

Such problems as computation of spectra of spin chains and vibrational spectra of molecules can be written as high-dimensional eigenvalue problems, i.e., when the eigenvector can be naturally represented as a multidimensional tensor. Tensor methods have proven to be an efficient tool for the approximation of solutions of high-dimensional eigenvalue problems, however, their performance deteriorates quickly when the number of eigenstates to be computed increases. We address this issue by designing a new algorithm motivated by the ideas of Riemannian optimization (optimization on smooth manifolds) for the approximation of multiple eigenstates in the tensor-train format, which is also known as matrix product state representation. The proposed algorithm is implemented in TensorFlow, which allows for both CPU and GPU parallelization.

Justin Fu, Mohammad Norouzi, Ofir Nachum et al.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) holds the promise of being able to leverage large, offline datasets for both evaluating and selecting complex policies for decision making. The ability to learn offline is particularly important in many real-world domains, such as in healthcare, recommender systems, or robotics, where online data collection is an expensive and potentially dangerous process. Being able to accurately evaluate and select high-performing policies without requiring online interaction could yield significant benefits in safety, time, and cost for these applications. While many OPE methods have been proposed in recent years, comparing results between papers is difficult because currently there is a lack of a comprehensive and unified benchmark, and measuring algorithmic progress has been challenging due to the lack of difficult evaluation tasks. In order to address this gap, we present a collection of policies that in conjunction with existing offline datasets can be used for benchmarking off-policy evaluation. Our tasks include a range of challenging high-dimensional continuous control problems, with wide selections of datasets and policies for performing policy selection. The goal of our benchmark is to provide a standardized measure of progress that is motivated from a set of principles designed to challenge and test the limits of existing OPE methods. We perform an evaluation of state-of-the-art algorithms and provide open-source access to our data and code to foster future research in this area.

Serkan Cabi, Sergio Gómez Colmenarejo, Alexander Novikov et al.

We present a framework for data-driven robotics that makes use of a large dataset of recorded robot experience and scales to several tasks using learned reward functions. We show how to apply this framework to accomplish three different object manipulation tasks on a real robot platform. Given demonstrations of a task together with task-agnostic recorded experience, we use a special form of human annotation as supervision to learn a reward function, which enables us to deal with real-world tasks where the reward signal cannot be acquired directly. Learned rewards are used in combination with a large dataset of experience from different tasks to learn a robot policy offline using batch RL. We show that using our approach it is possible to train agents to perform a variety of challenging manipulation tasks including stacking rigid objects and handling cloth.