Markov Models
Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning as a Hidden-Parameter Block MDP
Zhang, Amy, Sodhani, Shagun, Khetarpal, Khimya, Pineau, Joelle
Multi-task reinforcement learning is a rich paradigm where information from previously seen environments can be leveraged for better performance and improved sample-efficiency in new environments. In this work, we leverage ideas of common structure underlying a family of Markov decision processes (MDPs) to improve performance in the few-shot regime. We use assumptions of structure from Hidden-Parameter MDPs and Block MDPs to propose a new framework, HiP-BMDP, and approach for learning a common representation and universal dynamics model. To this end, we provide transfer and generalization bounds based on task and state similarity, along with sample complexity bounds that depend on the aggregate number of samples across tasks, rather than the number of tasks, a significant improvement over prior work. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, we empirically compare and show improvements against other multi-task and meta-reinforcement learning baselines.
Combining Deep Reinforcement Learning and Search for Imperfect-Information Games
Brown, Noam, Bakhtin, Anton, Lerer, Adam, Gong, Qucheng
The combination of deep reinforcement learning and search at both training and test time is a powerful paradigm that has led to a number of a successes in single-agent settings and perfect-information games, best exemplified by the success of AlphaZero. However, algorithms of this form have been unable to cope with imperfect-information games. This paper presents ReBeL, a general framework for self-play reinforcement learning and search for imperfect-information games. In the simpler setting of perfect-information games, ReBeL reduces to an algorithm similar to AlphaZero. Results show ReBeL leads to low exploitability in benchmark imperfect-information games and achieves superhuman performance in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em poker, while using far less domain knowledge than any prior poker AI. We also prove that ReBeL converges to a Nash equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games in tabular settings.
Off-policy Evaluation in Infinite-Horizon Reinforcement Learning with Latent Confounders
Bennett, Andrew, Kallus, Nathan, Li, Lihong, Mousavi, Ali
A fundamental question in offline reinforcement learning (RL) is how to estimate the value of some target evaluation policy, defined as the long-run average reward obtained by following the policy, using data logged by running a different behavior policy. This question, known as off-policy evaluation (OPE), often arises in applications such as healthcare, education, or robotics, where experimenting with running the target policy can be expensive or even impossible, but we have data logged following business as usual or current standards of care. A central concern using such passively observed data is that observed actions, rewards, and transitions may be confounded by unobserved variables, which can bias standard OPE methods that assume no unobserved confounders, or equivalently that a standard Markov decision process (MDP) model holds with fully observed state. Consider for example evaluating a new smart-phone app to help people living with type-1 diabetes time their insulin injections by monitoring their blood glucose level using some wearable device. Rather than risking giving bad advice that may harm individuals, we may consider first evaluating our injection-timing policy using existing longitudinal observations of individuals' blood glucose levels over time and the timing of insulin injections.
A Review on Computational Intelligence Techniques in Cloud and Edge Computing
Asim, Muhammad, Wang, Yong, Wang, Kezhi, Huang, Pei-Qiu
Cloud computing (CC) is a centralized computing paradigm that accumulates resources centrally and provides these resources to users through Internet. Although CC holds a large number of resources, it may not be acceptable by real-time mobile applications, as it is usually far away from users geographically. On the other hand, edge computing (EC), which distributes resources to the network edge, enjoys increasing popularity in the applications with low-latency and high-reliability requirements. EC provides resources in a decentralized manner, which can respond to users' requirements faster than the normal CC, but with limited computing capacities. As both CC and EC are resource-sensitive, several big issues arise, such as how to conduct job scheduling, resource allocation, and task offloading, which significantly influence the performance of the whole system. To tackle these issues, many optimization problems have been formulated. These optimization problems usually have complex properties, such as non-convexity and NP-hardness, which may not be addressed by the traditional convex optimization-based solutions. Computational intelligence (CI), consisting of a set of nature-inspired computational approaches, recently exhibits great potential in addressing these optimization problems in CC and EC. This paper provides an overview of research problems in CC and EC and recent progresses in addressing them with the help of CI techniques. Informative discussions and future research trends are also presented, with the aim of offering insights to the readers and motivating new research directions.
On the Variational Posterior of Dirichlet Process Deep Latent Gaussian Mixture Models
Echraibi, Amine, Flocon-Cholet, Joachim, Gosselin, Stéphane, Vaton, Sandrine
Thanks to the reparameterization trick, deep latent Gaussian models have shown tremendous success recently in learning latent representations. The ability to couple them however with nonparamet-ric priors such as the Dirichlet Process (DP) hasn't seen similar success due to its non parameteriz-able nature. In this paper, we present an alternative treatment of the variational posterior of the Dirichlet Process Deep Latent Gaussian Mixture Model (DP-DLGMM), where we show that the prior cluster parameters and the variational posteriors of the beta distributions and cluster hidden variables can be updated in closed-form. This leads to a standard reparameterization trick on the Gaussian latent variables knowing the cluster assignments. We demonstrate our approach on standard benchmark datasets, we show that our model is capable of generating realistic samples for each cluster obtained, and manifests competitive performance in a semi-supervised setting.
Bayesian Subspace HMM for the Zerospeech 2020 Challenge
In this paper we describe our submission to the Zerospeech 2020 challenge, where the participants are required to discover latent representations from unannotated speech, and to use those representations to perform speech synthesis, with synthesis quality used as a proxy metric for the unit quality. In our system, we use the Bayesian Subspace Hidden Markov Model (SHMM) for unit discovery. The SHMM models each unit as an HMM whose parameters are constrained to lie in a low dimensional subspace of the total parameter space which is trained to model phonetic variability. Our system compares favorably with the baseline on the human-evaluated character error rate while maintaining significantly lower unit bitrate.
Consistent Structured Prediction with Max-Min Margin Markov Networks
Nowak-Vila, Alex, Bach, Francis, Rudi, Alessandro
Max-margin methods for binary classification such as the support vector machine (SVM) have been extended to the structured prediction setting under the name of max-margin Markov networks ($M^3N$), or more generally structural SVMs. Unfortunately, these methods are statistically inconsistent when the relationship between inputs and labels is far from deterministic. We overcome such limitations by defining the learning problem in terms of a "max-min" margin formulation, naming the resulting method max-min margin Markov networks ($M^4N$). We prove consistency and finite sample generalization bounds for $M^4N$ and provide an explicit algorithm to compute the estimator. The algorithm achieves a generalization error of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ for a total cost of $O(n)$ projection-oracle calls (which have at most the same cost as the max-oracle from $M^3N$). Experiments on multi-class classification, ordinal regression, sequence prediction and ranking demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Unsupervised Deep Learning in Python
Online Courses Udemy - Unsupervised Deep Learning in Python, Theano / Tensorflow: Autoencoders, Restricted Boltzmann Machines, Deep Neural Networks, t-SNE and PCA Created by Lazy Programmer Inc. English [Auto] Students also bought Machine Learning and AI: Support Vector Machines in Python Recommender Systems and Deep Learning in Python Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning in Python Data Science: Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python Ensemble Machine Learning in Python: Random Forest, AdaBoost Preview this course GET COUPON CODE Description This course is the next logical step in my deep learning, data science, and machine learning series. I've done a lot of courses about deep learning, and I just released a course about unsupervised learning, where I talked about clustering and density estimation. So what do you get when you put these 2 together? In these course we'll start with some very basic stuff - principal components analysis (PCA), and a popular nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique known as t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding). Next, we'll look at a special type of unsupervised neural network called the autoencoder.
GPT-3 Creative Fiction
What if I told a story here, how would that story start?" Thus, the summarization prompt: "My second grader asked me what this passage means: …" When a given prompt isn't working and GPT-3 keeps pivoting into other modes of completion, that may mean that one hasn't constrained it enough by imitating a correct output, and one needs to go further; writing the first few words or sentence of the target output may be necessary.