CS 533
Intelligent Agents and Decision Making

Lecture Topics and Reading
Winter 2009

Date

Topic

Reading

Notes

Jan. 6

Classical STRIPS Planning, State-Space Search

Section 11.1-11.2

PDF PPT

Jan. 8

Partial-Order Planning (POP)

Graphplan

Section 11.3 (can skip part on unbound variables)

Section 11.4

PDF PPT


PDF PPT

Jan. 13

Planning as Satisfiability

Section 11.5, 11.6, see 7 for review of propositional logic (in particular 7.6 reviews inference algorithms)


PDF PPT

Jan. 15

cont. SAT-Plan; Heuristic Search Planning

Planning as Heuristic Search, B. Bonet and H. Geffner, Artificial Intelligence, Vol 129 (1-2), 2001 (you can skip Section 7)

PDF PPT

Jan. 20

cont. HSP;  Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) Sections 17.1-17.3

PDF PPT

Jan. 22

cont. MDPs


Jan. 27

cont. MDPs;  Reinforcement Learning (RL)
Sections 21.1-21.2 PDF PPT

Jan. 29

cont. RL


Feb. 3

cont. RL: RL in Large State Spaces Sections 21.4-21.5 PDF PPT

Feb. 5

cont. Large State Space: TD
Project Ideas
PDF PPT

Feb. 10

cont. Large State Space: Policy Gradient Search


Feb. 12

Midterm
Material Covered:
STRIPS Planning and MDPs (HW1-HW3)
(RL not covered)

Feb. 17

cont. Policy Gradient, Least Squares Policy Iteration (LSPI)
Optional Reading:
Least-Squares Policy Iteration, Michail Lagoudakis and Ronald Parr, Accepted to the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), Vol. 4, 2003, pp. 1107-1149.

PDF PPT

Feb. 19

cont. LSPI


Feb. 24

cont. LSPI, Simulation-Based Planning: Evaluation

PDF PPT

March 3

cont. Simulation-Based Planning: Rollout, Approximate Policy Iteration
Approximate Policy Iteration Note

March 5

cont. Simulation-Based Planning: API, Sparse Sampling
Optional: A Sparse Sampling Algorithm for Near-Optimal Planning in Large Markov Decision Processes. Michael Kearns, Y. Mansour and A. Ng. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1999 PDF PPT
March 10
cont. Simulation-Based Planning: UCT,
Distribute Takehome Final
Optional: Bandit Based Monte-Carlo Planning. Levente Kocsis & Csaba Szepesvari. European Conference, on Machine Learning, 2006

March 12

The stuff we didn't talk about, Q&A Session



March 18

Final Project Presentations: 2-4



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