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Adaptable Agent Populations via a Generative Model of Policies

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the natural world, life has found innumerable ways to survive and often thrive. Between and even within species, each individual is in some manner unique, and this diversity lends adaptability and robustness to life. In this work, we aim to learn a space of diverse and high-reward policies in a given environment. To this end, we introduce a generative model of policies for reinforcement learning, which maps a low-dimensional latent space to an agent policy space. Our method enables learning an entire population of agent policies, without requiring the use of separate policy parameters. Just as real world populations can adapt and evolve via natural selection, our method is able to adapt to changes in our environment solely by selecting for policies in latent space. We test our generative model's capabilities in a variety of environments, including an open-ended grid-world and a two-player soccer environment. Code, visualizations, and additional experiments can be found at https://kennyderek.github.io/adap/.


Markov locality and relating it to p locality

Neural Information Processing Systems

To gain intuition for how p-locality functions, we will introduce another notion of locality, called Markov locality, which will use the language of Markov blankets. We will prove that under relatively relaxed conditions p-locality and Markov locality are equivalent. This will allow us to relate the notion of locality to various graph structures commonly used to represent probability distributions, and will be a key step in proving Properties 2.1 and 2.2. We start by defining the Markov boundary, M(X,S), of a random variable X contained in a set of random variables S, as a minimal set such that p(X|S) = p(X|M(X,S)). The Markov boundary defines a minimal set of variables such that, conditioned on these variables, conditioning on no additional random variables in S changes the probability of X [39]. Similarly, we define the Markov blanket, M(X,S) for X in S as any set of variables such that conditioning on M(X,S), makes X conditionally independent from all other variables [39]. In this way, the Markov boundary is a Markov blanket but not all blankets are boundaries. Markov locality: Given probability distribution p(Z) and function f: RNX+Nฮ˜ RNฮ˜, the update function f(Z) is Markov-local with respect to the distribution p over Z if and only if k: Z โ„ฆs.t. AMarkov boundary can be thought of as the set of variables that'locally' communicate with the parameter ฮ˜k, thus providing a natural measure of locality. Importantly, for Markov-locality to be of use, we would like the Markov boundaries of random variables in the model of interest to be unique.



Robust and differentially private mean estimation

Neural Information Processing Systems

In statistical learning and analysis from shared data, which is increasingly widely adopted in platforms such as federated learning and meta-learning, there are two major concerns: privacy and robustness. Each participating individual should be able to contribute without the fear of leaking one's sensitive information. At the same time, the system should be robust in the presence of malicious participants inserting corrupted data. Recent algorithmic advances in learning from shared data focus on either one of these threats, leaving the system vulnerable to the other.






Appendices619

Neural Information Processing Systems

AAdditional Experiments620 Task 1 - Grouping In addition to grouping clue words using token embeddings (discussed in621 the main paper 4), we also ran grouping the words by clustering on'contextual' embeddings. We622 experimentally induce'context' by joining the sixteen (16) word tokens (in a random order) into a623 single pseudo-sentence. The embeddings for each token were different based on the ordering of the624 tokens. We repeat the random ordering sixteen times and report the mean and variance of the results625 obtained in Table 6.626 Mean standard deviation over 16 random seeds is shown. Task 2 - Connections In addition to prompting based results on GPT-4 (discussed in 4), we ran627 experiments on additional LLMs like LLaMa [67] (7B, 13B) using pre-trained configuration weights628 obtained by permission from Meta AI. However, without additional fine-tuning on the specific task,629 these LLMs were unable to solve the task in a meaningful manner.