Mahdi Kallel

About me

I joined the LiteRL Group at the JMU Würzburg in April of 2023 as Ph.D. candidate.  Before joining the group, I graduated from Telecom Paris with a major in Machine Learning and Operations research.

I wrote my thesis titled "Deterministic exploration in Reinforcement learning" while working at the  SCOOL group at INRIA Lille as a visiting student under the supervision of Prof. Riad Akrour.

In this work, we built a bridge between direct policy search methods oblivious to the sequential nature of MDPs, and value-based reinforcement learning algorithms, which suffer under sparse rewards.

I am passionate about model-based reinforcement learning, bayesian optimization, explainability, and incorporating human feedback into the learning loop