Research Associate and Adjunct Professor PI of the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab (RLAI) Department of Computing Science University of Alberta amw8@ualberta.ca (812) 292-0149

I graduated from the University of Alberta with a Ph.D. in Computing Science in 2015. During my doctoral studies I was advised by Richard Sutton, working in the RLAI lab. After that I worked as a Post-doc and Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Indiana University in Bloomington.

My Students

Han Wang (MSc): han8@ualberta.ca
Eugene Chen (MSc)
Andrew Jacobsen (NSERC USRA): ajjacobs@ualberta.ca

Teaching

CMPUT 366: Intelligent Systems - Fall 2017
CMPUT 609: Reinforcement Learning - Fall 2017
CSCI-B 659: Reinforcement learning for Artificial Intelligence - Spring 2017
CSCI-B 659: Reinforcement learning for Artificial Intelligence - Spring 2016

Research

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Robotics, Knowledge Representation and Intrinsic Motivation

My research focuses on the problem of Artifical Intelligence, specifically how to replicate or simulate human level intelligence in real and simulated agents. My research program explores how the problem of intelligence can be modelled as a reinforcement learning agent interacting with some unknown enviroment, learning from a scalar reward signal rather than explicit feedback. My contributions include new algorithms for reinforcement learning, and large-scale demonstrations of learning on mobile robots.

Curriculum vitae

My current CV can be found here.

Journal Papers

Modayil, J., White, A., Sutton, R. S. (2014). Multi-timescale Nexting in a Reinforcement Learning Robot. Adaptive Behavior, 22(2):146--160.

Whiteson, S., Tanner, B., & White, A. (2010). The reinforcement learning competitions. AI Magazine, 31(2): 81--94.

Tanner, B., & White, A. (2009). RL-Glue: Language-independent software for reinforcement-learning experiments. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 10: 2133--2136.

Conference Papers

Sherstan C., Bennett B., Young K., Ashley D., White, A., White M., Sutton R. (2018). Directly Estimating the Variance of the $\lambda$-Return Using Temporal-Difference Methods . Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).

Pan Y., Zaheer M., White, A., Patterson A., White M. (2018). Organizing experience: a deeper look at replay mechanisms for sample-based planning in continuous state domains . International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).

Pan Y., White, A., White M. (2017). Accelerated Gradient Temporal Difference Learning . AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Sherstan, C., Machado, M., ,White, A., Patrick P. (2016). Introspective Agents: Confidence Measures for General Value Functions, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

White, A., White M. (2016). Investigating practical linear temporal difference learning. In International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS). [ CODE ]

White, M., White A. (2016) Adapting the trace parameter in reinforcement learning, In International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS).

White, A., Modayil, J., & Sutton, R. S. (2012). Scaling life-long off-policy learning. In the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics, 1--6. [paper of distinction award]

Modayil, J., White, A., Pilarski, P. M., & Sutton, R. S. (2012). Acquiring a broad range of empirical knowledge in real time by temporal-difference learning. In the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1903--1910.

Modayil, J., White, A., Sutton, R. S. (2012). Multi-timescale Nexting in a Reinforcement Learning Robot. Presented at the 2012 International Conference on Adaptive Behaviour, Odense, Denmark. To appear in: SAB 12, LNAI 7426, pp. 299-309, T. Ziemke, C. Balkenius, and J. Hallam, Eds., Springer Heidelberg.

Sutton, R. S., Modayil, J., Delp, M., Degris, T., Pilarski, P. M., White, A., & Precup, D. (2011). Horde: A scalable real-time architecture for learning knowledge from unsupervised sensorimotor interaction. In The 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: 2, 761--768.

White, M., & White, A. (2010). Interval estimation for reinforcement-learning algorithms in continuous-state domains. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2433--2441.

Sturtevant, N. R., & White, A. M. (2007). Feature construction for reinforcement learning in hearts. In Computers and Games . Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 122--134

Other published works

Yangchen P., White, A., White M. (2017). Accelerated Gradient Temporal Difference Learning . European workshop on reinforcement learning (EWRL).

Schlegel M., White, A., White M. (2017). Stable predictive representations with general value functions for continual learning . Continual Learning and Deep Networks workshop at the Neural Information Processing System Conference.

White, A., & Sutton, R. S. (2014). GQ (lambda) Quick Reference Guide.

White, A., Modayil, J., & Sutton, R. S. (2014). Surprise and curiosity for big data robotics. In Workshops at the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Modayil, J., White, A., Pilarski, P. M., Sutton, R. S. (2012). Acquiring Diverse Predictive Knowledge in Real Time by Temporal-difference Learning. International Workshop on Evolutionary and Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Robot Systems, Montpellier, France. [Best paper award]

Modayil, J., Pilarski, P., White, A., Degris, T., & Sutton, R. (2010). Off-policy knowledge maintenance for robots. In Proceedings of Robotics Science and Systems Workshop (Towards Closing the Loop: Active Learning for Robotics) : 55.

Theses

White, A. (2015) Developing a predictive approach to knowledge. Doctoral thesis, University of Alberta.

White, A. (2006) A standard system for benchmarking in reinforcement learning. Master's thesis, University of Alberta.