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Taylor Killian

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3 papers

1 author row

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

BraVE: Offline Reinforcement Learning for Discrete Combinatorial Action Spaces

Matthew Landers
Taylor Killian
Hugo Barnes
Tom Hartvigsen
Afsaneh Doryab

Offline reinforcement learning in high-dimensional, discrete action spaces is challenging due to the exponential scaling of the joint action space with the number of sub-actions and the complexity of modeling sub-action dependencies. Existing methods either exhaustively evaluate the action space, making them computationally infeasible, or factorize Q-values, failing to represent joint sub-action effects. We propose \textbf{Bra}nch \textbf{V}alue \textbf{E}stimation (BraVE), a value-based method that uses tree-structured action traversal to evaluate a linear number of joint actions while preserving dependency structure. BraVE outperforms prior offline RL methods by up to $20\times$ in environments with over four million actions.

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NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes

Taylor Killian
Samuel Daulton
George Konidaris
Finale Doshi-Velez

We introduce a new formulation of the Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Process (HiP-MDP), a framework for modeling families of related tasks using low-dimensional latent embeddings. Our new framework correctly models the joint uncertainty in the latent parameters and the state space. We also replace the original Gaussian Process-based model with a Bayesian Neural Network, enabling more scalable inference. Thus, we expand the scope of the HiP-MDP to applications with higher dimensions and more complex dynamics.

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AAAI Conference 2017 Short Paper

Robust and Efficient Transfer Learning with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes

Taylor Killian
George Konidaris
Finale Doshi-Velez

An intriguing application of transfer learning emerges when tasks arise with similar, but not identical, dynamics. Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDP) embed these tasks into a low-dimensional space; given the embedding parameters one can identify the MDP for a particular task. However, the original formulation of HiP-MDP had a critical flaw: the embedding uncertainty was modeled independently of the agent's state uncertainty, requiring an arduous training procedure. In this work, we apply a Gaussian Process latent variable model to jointly model the dynamics and the embedding, leading to a more elegant formulation, one that allows for better uncertainty quantification and thus more robust transfer.

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