Abhishek Naik on Continuing RL & Average Reward

Abhishek Naik was a student at University of Alberta and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and he just finished his PhD in reinforcement learning, working with Rich Sutton.  Now he is a postdoc fellow at the National Research Council of Canada, where he does AI research on Space applications.  Featured References  Reinforcement Learning for Continuing Problems Using Average Reward Abhishek Naik Ph.D. dissertation 2024  Reward Centering Abhishek Naik, Yi Wan, Manan Tomar, Richard S. Sutton 2024    Learning and Planning in Average-Reward Markov Decision Processes Yi Wan, Abhishek Naik, Richard S. Sutton 2020  Discounted Reinforcement Learning Is Not an Optimization Problem  Abhishek Naik, Roshan Shariff, Niko Yasui, Hengshuai Yao, Richard S. Sutton 2019   Additional References Explaining dopamine through prediction errors and beyond, Gershman et al 2024 (proposes Differential-TD-like learning mechanism in the brain around Box 4)