19/01/26 – Séminaire de Pegah Alizadeh (ERIC) : How Much Does Knowing the Environment Help in Making Decisions: examples from energy and Telecom networks #ReinforcementLearning

Title: How Much Does Knowing the Environment Help in Making Decisions: examples from energy and Telecom networks.

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers powerful tools for optimizing complex systems such as energy management and telecommunications networks, but practical deployment is often limited by data scarcity, safety constraints, and stochastic environmental dynamics. This presentation highlights recent advances in predictive and offline RL methods that address these challenges. We first discuss policy optimization approaches augmented with predictive models of system dynamics to improve learning efficiency. We then examine offline RL for network optimization, demonstrating that value-based and sequence-based methods can learn effective control policies from historical data, with performance varying depending on dataset characteristics, the level of stochasticity, and the specific operational scenario considered.