I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, focusing on reinforcement learning, which I believe is the way to artificial intelligence. I am honored to be supervised by Professor Rich Sutton.
My long-term research goal is to build better learning and planning, prediction and control algorithms for reinforcement learning problems. I am particularly interested in designing these algorithms 1) for the average reward problem setting, 2) with function approximation, and 3) with temporal abstractions, in particular options.
Previously, I earned my Bachelor degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), where I worked in SJTU Speech Lab, advised by Professor Kai Yu. After that I earned my master degree, also in ECE, from University of Michigan. I had a great experience working in Intelligent Robotics Lab, advised by Professor Ben Kuipers.
Email: wan6@ualberta.ca
Publications
Shangtong Zhang*, Yi Wan*, Richard S. Sutton, and Shimon Whiteson (2021), Average-Reward Off-Policy Policy Evaluation with Function Approximation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.02808
Yi Wan*, Ahbishek Naik*, and Richard S. Sutton (2020), Learning and Planning in Average-Reward Markov Decision Processes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.16318.
Zhimin Hou*, Kuangen Zhang*, Yi Wan, Dongyu Li, Chenglong Fu, Haoyong Yu, Off-policy Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning : Soft Actor-Critic with Advantage Weighted Mixture Policy(SAC-AWMP) (2020). arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.02829.
Yi Wan*, Muhammad Zaheer*, Adam White, Martha White and Richard S. Sutton (2019), Planning with Expectation Models. In Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 3649-3655). AAAI Press.
Yi Wan*, Muhammad Zaheer*, Martha White and Richard S. Sutton (2018), Model-based Reinforcement Learning with Non-linear Expectation Models and Stochastic Environments. In FAIM Workshop on Prediction and Generative Modeling in Reinforcement Learning, Stockholm, Sweden.
Code
AlphaEx: A Python Toolkit for Managing Large Number of Experiments
News
[Sep. 2017] I started my Computing Science Ph.D. program at the University of Alberta.
[July 2017] I started my software engineering summer intern at YITU, Shanghai, China.
[Apr. 2017] I earned my M.S.E degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan.