OBJECTIVES This study examines the content and role of ethical analysis in health technology assessment (HTA) and horizon scanning publications. It proposes that ethical analysis in HTA is of at least two different types: an ethics of HTA and an ethics in HTA. METHODS I examine the critical differences between these approaches through the examples of the analysis of genetic screening for brea...

Eigenoptions (EOs) have been recently introduced as a promising idea for generating a diverse set of options through the graph Laplacian, having been shown to allow efficient exploration Machado et al. [2017a]. Despite its first initial promising results, a couple of issues in current algorithms limit its application, namely: 1) EO methods require two separate steps (eigenoption discovery and r...

Actor-Critic based approaches were among the first to address reinforcement learning in a general setting. Recently, these algorithms have gained renewed interest due to their generality, good convergence properties, and possible biological relevance. In this paper, we introduce an online temporal difference based actor-critic algorithm which is proved to converge to a neighborhood of a local m...

We consider the estimation of the policy gradient in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) with a special class of structured policies that are finite-state controllers. We show that the gradient estimation can be done in the Actor-Critic framework, by making the critic compute a “value” function that does not depend on the states of POMDP. This function is the conditional mean...