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Wendelin Böhmer

Wendelin Böhmer contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Multiagent Systems Robotics

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preprint2026arXiv

EfficientTDMPC: Improved MPC Objectives for Sample-Efficient Continuous Control

We introduce EfficientTDMPC, a sample-efficient model-based reinforcement learning method for continuous control built on the TD-MPC family of algorithms. Central to this family is a planner that aims to find an action sequence that maximizes the estimated return. The return is estimated using a learned model and value networks, each of which can introduce error. EfficientTDMPC proposes to reduce this error in two ways. First, it introduces an ensemble of dynamics models and averages the return estimates across those models and across different rollout depths. Second, it adds the option to apply an uncertainty penalty to the planner objective, yielding a planner that avoids actions with uncertain return estimates. It then adds practical improvements which increase buffer data freshness and reduce compute. Lastly, we find that our contributions enable EfficientTDMPC to benefit more from a higher update-to-data (UTD) ratio, further improving sample efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, in the low data regime of each benchmark, EfficientTDMPC achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) in terms of sample efficiency on HumanoidBench-Hard and DMC hard, while matching SOTA on DMC easy.

preprint2026arXiv

PMCTS: Particle Monte Carlo Tree Search for Principled Parallelized Inference Time Scaling

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a widely used approach for policy improvement through search with increasing popularity for real world applications. Due to the sequential and deterministic nature of its search, runtime-scaling of MCTS with parallel compute remains a major challenge. We introduce Particle MCTS (PMCTS), to our knowledge the first principled parallel MCTS algorithm which is suited for neural network evaluations and can preserve formal policy improvement guarantees. Empirically, PMCTS scales well with parallel compute and significantly outperforms the popular heuristic-based baselines across domains.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Coordination Graphs

This paper introduces the deep coordination graph (DCG) for collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning. DCG strikes a flexible trade-off between representational capacity and generalization by factoring the joint value function of all agents according to a coordination graph into payoffs between pairs of agents. The value can be maximized by local message passing along the graph, which allows training of the value function end-to-end with Q-learning. Payoff functions are approximated with deep neural networks that employ parameter sharing and low-rank approximations to significantly improve sample efficiency. We show that DCG can solve predator-prey tasks that highlight the relative overgeneralization pathology, as well as challenging StarCraft II micromanagement tasks.

preprint2020arXiv

Multitask Soft Option Learning

We present Multitask Soft Option Learning(MSOL), a hierarchical multitask framework based on Planning as Inference. MSOL extends the concept of options, using separate variational posteriors for each task, regularized by a shared prior. This ''soft'' version of options avoids several instabilities during training in a multitask setting, and provides a natural way to learn both intra-option policies and their terminations. Furthermore, it allows fine-tuning of options for new tasks without forgetting their learned policies, leading to faster training without reducing the expressiveness of the hierarchical policy. We demonstrate empirically that MSOL significantly outperforms both hierarchical and flat transfer-learning baselines.

preprint2020arXiv

Optimistic Exploration even with a Pessimistic Initialisation

Optimistic initialisation is an effective strategy for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular case, all provably efficient model-free algorithms rely on it. However, model-free deep RL algorithms do not use optimistic initialisation despite taking inspiration from these provably efficient tabular algorithms. In particular, in scenarios with only positive rewards, Q-values are initialised at their lowest possible values due to commonly used network initialisation schemes, a pessimistic initialisation. Merely initialising the network to output optimistic Q-values is not enough, since we cannot ensure that they remain optimistic for novel state-action pairs, which is crucial for exploration. We propose a simple count-based augmentation to pessimistically initialised Q-values that separates the source of optimism from the neural network. We show that this scheme is provably efficient in the tabular setting and extend it to the deep RL setting. Our algorithm, Optimistic Pessimistically Initialised Q-Learning (OPIQ), augments the Q-value estimates of a DQN-based agent with count-derived bonuses to ensure optimism during both action selection and bootstrapping. We show that OPIQ outperforms non-optimistic DQN variants that utilise a pseudocount-based intrinsic motivation in hard exploration tasks, and that it predicts optimistic estimates for novel state-action pairs.

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