Instructional Material
Online Reinforcement Learning in Periodic MDP
Aniket, Ayush, Chattopadhyay, Arpan
We study learning in periodic Markov Decision Process (MDP), a special type of non-stationary MDP where both the state transition probabilities and reward functions vary periodically, under the average reward maximization setting. We formulate the problem as a stationary MDP by augmenting the state space with the period index, and propose a periodic upper confidence bound reinforcement learning-2 (PUCRL2) algorithm. We show that the regret of PUCRL2 varies linearly with the period $N$ and as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{Tlog T})$ with the horizon length $T$. Utilizing the information about the sparsity of transition matrix of augmented MDP, we propose another algorithm PUCRLB which enhances upon PUCRL2, both in terms of regret ($O(\sqrt{N})$ dependency on period) and empirical performance. Finally, we propose two other algorithms U-PUCRL2 and U-PUCRLB for extended uncertainty in the environment in which the period is unknown but a set of candidate periods are known. Numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of all the algorithms.
Design Project of an Open-Source, Low-Cost, and Lightweight Robotic Manipulator for High School Students
Huang, Isabella, Zhao, Qianwen, Fontaine, Maxine, Wang, Long
In recent years, there is an increasing interest in high school robotics extracurriculars such as robotics clubs and robotics competitions. The growing demand is a result of more ubiquitous open-source software and affordable off-the-shelf hardware kits, which significantly help lower the barrier for entry-level robotics hobbyists. In this project, we present an open-source, low-cost, and lightweight robotic manipulator designed and developed by a high school researcher under the guidance of a university faculty and a Ph.D. student. We believe the presented project is suitable for high school robotics research and educational activities. Our open-source package consists of mechanical design models, mechatronics specifications, and software program source codes. The mechanical design models include CAD (Computer Aided Design) files that are ready for prototyping (3D printing technology) and serve as an assembly guide accommodated with a complete bill of materials. Electrical wiring diagrams and low-level controllers are documented in detail as part of the open-source software package. The educational objective of this project is to enable high school student teams to replicate and build a robotic manipulator. The engineering experience that high school students acquire in the proposed project is full-stack, including mechanical design, mechatronics, and programming. The project significantly enriches their hands-on engineering experience in a project-based environment. Throughout this project, we discovered that the high school researcher was able to apply multidisciplinary knowledge from K-12 STEM courses to build the robotic manipulator. The researcher was able to go through a system engineering design and development process and obtain skills to use professional engineering tools including SolidWorks and Arduino microcontrollers.
Microsoft to showcase purpose-built AI infrastructure at NVIDIA GTC
Join Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC, a free online global technology conference (GTC), March 20 to 23 to learn how organizations of any size can power AI innovation with purpose-built cloud infrastructure from Microsoft. Microsoft's Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure is uniquely designed for AI workloads and helps build and train some of the industry's most advanced AI solutions. From data preparation to model and infrastructure performance management, Azure's comprehensive portfolio of powerful and massively scalable GPU-accelerated virtual machines (VMs) and seamless integration with services like Azure Batch and open-source solutions helps streamline management and automation of large AI models and infrastructure. Attend NVIDIA GTC to discover how Azure AI infrastructure optimized for AI performance can deliver speed and scale in the cloud and help you reduce the complexity of building, training, and bringing AI models into production. Don't miss session S52469 featuring Nidhi Chappell, a recipient of the 2023 People to Watch, recognized as a high-performance computing (HPC) luminary by HPCwire.
Recommender Systems and Deep Learning in Python - Udemy Free Coupons Discount - Couse Sites
Free Coupon Discount - The most in-depth course on recommendation systems with deep learning, machine learning, data science, and AI techniques Created by Lazy Programmer Inc. Students also bought Artificial Intelligence: Reinforcement Learning in Python Data Science: Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python Unsupervised Machine Learning Hidden Markov Models in Python Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning in Python Cluster Analysis and Unsupervised Machine Learning in Python Preview this Udemy Course GET COUPON CODE Description Believe it or not, almost all online businesses today make use of recommender systems in some way or another. What do I mean by "recommender systems", and why are they useful? Let's look at the top 3 websites on the Internet, according to Alexa: Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Recommender systems form the very foundation of these technologies. Google: Search results They are why Google is the most successful technology company today.
GitHub - ajaymache/machine-learning-yearning: Machine Learning Yearning book by ๐ ฐ ๐ท๐ญ๐ป๐ฎ๐ ๐
The book has been divided into 13 parts originally by Prof. Andrew NG along with the complete book with all the parts consolidated. In this book you will learn how to align on ML strategies in a team setting, as well as how to set up development (dev) sets and test sets. Recommendations for how to set up dev/test sets have been changing as Machine Learning is moving toward bigger datasets, and this explains how you should do it for modern ML projects.
Learn Machine Learning - [2022] Best Machine Learning Tutorials
Learning Machine Learning? Check out these best online Machine Learning courses and tutorials recommended by the data science community. Pick the tutorial as per your learning style: video tutorials or a book. Free course or paid. Tutorials for beginners or advanced learners. Check Machine Learning community's reviews & comments.
10 Best Advanced Machine Learning Courses You Must Know in 2023
Are you looking for the Best Advanced Machine Learning Courses?โฆ If yes, then this article is for you. In this article, you will find the 10 Best Advanced Machine Learning Courses. To gain Machine Learning skills, there are numerous courses available. So, without wasting your time, let's start finding the Best Advanced Machine Learning Coursesโ This is a Nanodegree Program offered by Udacity.
Adaptive Policy Learning for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
Zheng, Han, Luo, Xufang, Wei, Pengfei, Song, Xuan, Li, Dongsheng, Jiang, Jing
Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) needs an environment to collect fresh data, which is impractical when online interactions are costly. Offline RL provides an alternative solution by directly learning from the previously collected dataset. However, it will yield unsatisfactory performance if the quality of the offline datasets is poor. In this paper, we consider an offline-to-online setting where the agent is first learned from the offline dataset and then trained online, and propose a framework called Adaptive Policy Learning for effectively taking advantage of offline and online data. Specifically, we explicitly consider the difference between the online and offline data and apply an adaptive update scheme accordingly, that is, a pessimistic update strategy for the offline dataset and an optimistic/greedy update scheme for the online dataset. Such a simple and effective method provides a way to mix the offline and online RL and achieve the best of both worlds. We further provide two detailed algorithms for implementing the framework through embedding value or policy-based RL algorithms into it. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on popular continuous control tasks, and results show that our algorithm can learn the expert policy with high sample efficiency even when the quality of offline dataset is poor, e.g., random dataset.
DualMix: Unleashing the Potential of Data Augmentation for Online Class-Incremental Learning
Fan, Yunfeng, Xu, Wenchao, Wang, Haozhao, Zhu, Jiaqi, Wang, Junxiao, Guo, Song
Online Class-Incremental (OCI) learning has sparked new approaches to expand the previously trained model knowledge from sequentially arriving data streams with new classes. Unfortunately, OCI learning can suffer from catastrophic forgetting (CF) as the decision boundaries for old classes can become inaccurate when perturbated by new ones. Existing literature have applied the data augmentation (DA) to alleviate the model forgetting, while the role of DA in OCI has not been well understood so far. In this paper, we theoretically show that augmented samples with lower correlation to the original data are more effective in preventing forgetting. However, aggressive augmentation may also reduce the consistency between data and corresponding labels, which motivates us to exploit proper DA to boost the OCI performance and prevent the CF problem. We propose the Enhanced Mixup (EnMix) method that mixes the augmented samples and their labels simultaneously, which is shown to enhance the sample diversity while maintaining strong consistency with corresponding labels. Further, to solve the class imbalance problem, we design an Adaptive Mixup (AdpMix) method to calibrate the decision boundaries by mixing samples from both old and new classes and dynamically adjusting the label mixing ratio. Our approach is demonstrated to be effective on several benchmark datasets through extensive experiments, and it is shown to be compatible with other replay-based techniques.