M.Sc. Mahdi Kallel

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

I wrote my thesis, “Deterministic Exploration in Reinforcement Learning”, while working in 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, which are 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.