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Researcher profile

Andrew Perrault

Andrew Perrault contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputer Science and Game Theorycs.CY

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Recovering Physical Dynamics from Discrete Observations via Intrinsic Differential Consistency

Recovering continuous-time dynamics from discrete observations is difficult because local supervision (e.g., pointwise regression targets, derivative approximations, or equation residuals) loses fidelity as the observation interval grows. We replace local supervision with a global structural constraint: any flow representing autonomous dynamics must satisfy the semi-group property under time translation. We train a time-conditioned secant velocity field whose deviation from this property, which we call Symmetry Rupture, serves two purposes. As a training regularizer, it confines the hypothesis space to flows that compose consistently across temporal scales. As an inference oracle, it lets the solver select the largest step size that preserves internal consistency, replacing the local truncation error that conventional adaptive solvers depend on. On the diffusion-reaction benchmark under time-informed inference, our method reduces rollout RMSE by 87\% while using 5x fewer function evaluations than a Neural ODE baseline. In the more demanding direct auto-regressive setting, where the model must predict distant future frames without intermediate temporal cues, our adaptive solver allocates compute based on local geometric complexity -- maintaining the lowest rollout RMSE on two of three PDE benchmarks while baselines either diverge or require up to an order of magnitude more function evaluations to remain stable.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

AI for Social Impact: Learning and Planning in the Data-to-Deployment Pipeline

With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. In pursuit of this goal of AI for Social Impact, we as AI researchers must go beyond improvements in computational methodology; it is important to step out in the field to demonstrate social impact. To this end, we focus on the problems of public safety and security, wildlife conservation, and public health in low-resource communities, and present research advances in multiagent systems to address one key cross-cutting challenge: how to effectively deploy our limited intervention resources in these problem domains. We present case studies from our deployments around the world as well as lessons learned that we hope are of use to researchers who are interested in AI for Social Impact. In pushing this research agenda, we believe AI can indeed play an important role in fighting social injustice and improving society.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learning MDPs from Features: Predict-Then-Optimize for Sequential Decision Problems by Reinforcement Learning

In the predict-then-optimize framework, the objective is to train a predictive model, mapping from environment features to parameters of an optimization problem, which maximizes decision quality when the optimization is subsequently solved. Recent work on decision-focused learning shows that embedding the optimization problem in the training pipeline can improve decision quality and help generalize better to unseen tasks compared to relying on an intermediate loss function for evaluating prediction quality. We study the predict-then-optimize framework in the context of sequential decision problems (formulated as MDPs) that are solved via reinforcement learning. In particular, we are given environment features and a set of trajectories from training MDPs, which we use to train a predictive model that generalizes to unseen test MDPs without trajectories. Two significant computational challenges arise in applying decision-focused learning to MDPs: (i) large state and action spaces make it infeasible for existing techniques to differentiate through MDP problems, and (ii) the high-dimensional policy space, as parameterized by a neural network, makes differentiating through a policy expensive. We resolve the first challenge by sampling provably unbiased derivatives to approximate and differentiate through optimality conditions, and the second challenge by using a low-rank approximation to the high-dimensional sample-based derivatives. We implement both Bellman--based and policy gradient--based decision-focused learning on three different MDP problems with missing parameters, and show that decision-focused learning performs better in generalization to unseen tasks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Training Transition Policies via Distribution Matching for Complex Tasks

Humans decompose novel complex tasks into simpler ones to exploit previously learned skills. Analogously, hierarchical reinforcement learning seeks to leverage lower-level policies for simple tasks to solve complex ones. However, because each lower-level policy induces a different distribution of states, transitioning from one lower-level policy to another may fail due to an unexpected starting state. We introduce transition policies that smoothly connect lower-level policies by producing a distribution of states and actions that matches what is expected by the next policy. Training transition policies is challenging because the natural reward signal -- whether the next policy can execute its subtask successfully -- is sparse. By training transition policies via adversarial inverse reinforcement learning to match the distribution of expected states and actions, we avoid relying on task-based reward. To further improve performance, we use deep Q-learning with a binary action space to determine when to switch from a transition policy to the next pre-trained policy, using the success or failure of the next subtask as the reward. Although the reward is still sparse, the problem is less severe due to the simple binary action space. We demonstrate our method on continuous bipedal locomotion and arm manipulation tasks that require diverse skills. We show that it smoothly connects the lower-level policies, achieving higher success rates than previous methods that search for successful trajectories based on a reward function, but do not match the state distribution.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Collapsing Bandits and Their Application to Public Health Interventions

We propose and study Collpasing Bandits, a new restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) setting in which each arm follows a binary-state Markovian process with a special structure: when an arm is played, the state is fully observed, thus "collapsing" any uncertainty, but when an arm is passive, no observation is made, thus allowing uncertainty to evolve. The goal is to keep as many arms in the "good" state as possible by planning a limited budget of actions per round. Such Collapsing Bandits are natural models for many healthcare domains in which workers must simultaneously monitor patients and deliver interventions in a way that maximizes the health of their patient cohort. Our main contributions are as follows: (i) Building on the Whittle index technique for RMABs, we derive conditions under which the Collapsing Bandits problem is indexable. Our derivation hinges on novel conditions that characterize when the optimal policies may take the form of either "forward" or "reverse" threshold policies. (ii) We exploit the optimality of threshold policies to build fast algorithms for computing the Whittle index, including a closed-form. (iii) We evaluate our algorithm on several data distributions including data from a real-world healthcare task in which a worker must monitor and deliver interventions to maximize their patients' adherence to tuberculosis medication. Our algorithm achieves a 3-order-of-magnitude speedup compared to state-of-the-art RMAB techniques while achieving similar performance.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

End-to-End Game-Focused Learning of Adversary Behavior in Security Games

Stackelberg security games are a critical tool for maximizing the utility of limited defense resources to protect important targets from an intelligent adversary. Motivated by green security, where the defender may only observe an adversary's response to defense on a limited set of targets, we study the problem of learning a defense that generalizes well to a new set of targets with novel feature values and combinations. Traditionally, this problem has been addressed via a two-stage approach where an adversary model is trained to maximize predictive accuracy without considering the defender's optimization problem. We develop an end-to-end game-focused approach, where the adversary model is trained to maximize a surrogate for the defender's expected utility. We show both in theory and experimental results that our game-focused approach achieves higher defender expected utility than the two-stage alternative when there is limited data.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Game Theory on the Ground: The Effect of Increased Patrols on Deterring Poachers

Applications of artificial intelligence for wildlife protection have focused on learning models of poacher behavior based on historical patterns. However, poachers' behaviors are described not only by their historical preferences, but also their reaction to ranger patrols. Past work applying machine learning and game theory to combat poaching have hypothesized that ranger patrols deter poachers, but have been unable to find evidence to identify how or even if deterrence occurs. Here for the first time, we demonstrate a measurable deterrence effect on real-world poaching data. We show that increased patrols in one region deter poaching in the next timestep, but poachers then move to neighboring regions. Our findings offer guidance on how adversaries should be modeled in realistic game-theoretic settings.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access