Reinforcement Learning
RLET: A Reinforcement Learning Based Approach for Explainable QA with Entailment Trees
Liu, Tengxiao, Guo, Qipeng, Hu, Xiangkun, Zhang, Yue, Qiu, Xipeng, Zhang, Zheng
Interpreting the reasoning process from questions to answers poses a challenge in approaching explainable QA. A recently proposed structured reasoning format, entailment tree, manages to offer explicit logical deductions with entailment steps in a tree structure. To generate entailment trees, prior single pass sequence-to-sequence models lack visible internal decision probability, while stepwise approaches are supervised with extracted single step data and cannot model the tree as a whole. In this work, we propose RLET, a Reinforcement Learning based Entailment Tree generation framework, which is trained utilising the cumulative signals across the whole tree. RLET iteratively performs single step reasoning with sentence selection and deduction generation modules, from which the training signal is accumulated across the tree with elaborately designed aligned reward function that is consistent with the evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce RL into the entailment tree generation task. Experiments on three settings of the EntailmentBank dataset demonstrate the strength of using RL framework.
Planning to the Information Horizon of BAMDPs via Epistemic State Abstraction
Arumugam, Dilip, Singh, Satinder
The Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP) formalism pursues the Bayes-optimal solution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning. As the computation of exact solutions to Bayesian reinforcement-learning problems is intractable, much of the literature has focused on developing suitable approximation algorithms. In this work, before diving into algorithm design, we first define, under mild structural assumptions, a complexity measure for BAMDP planning. As efficient exploration in BAMDPs hinges upon the judicious acquisition of information, our complexity measure highlights the worst-case difficulty of gathering information and exhausting epistemic uncertainty. To illustrate its significance, we establish a computationally-intractable, exact planning algorithm that takes advantage of this measure to show more efficient planning. We then conclude by introducing a specific form of state abstraction with the potential to reduce BAMDP complexity and gives rise to a computationally-tractable, approximate planning algorithm.
On Rate-Distortion Theory in Capacity-Limited Cognition & Reinforcement Learning
Arumugam, Dilip, Ho, Mark K., Goodman, Noah D., Van Roy, Benjamin
Throughout the cognitive-science literature, there is widespread agreement that decision-making agents operating in the real world do so under limited information-processing capabilities and without access to unbounded cognitive or computational resources. Prior work has drawn inspiration from this fact and leveraged an information-theoretic model of such behaviors or policies as communication channels operating under a bounded rate constraint. Meanwhile, a parallel line of work also capitalizes on the same principles from rate-distortion theory to formalize capacity-limited decision making through the notion of a learning target, which facilitates Bayesian regret bounds for provably-efficient learning algorithms. In this paper, we aim to elucidate this latter perspective by presenting a brief survey of these information-theoretic models of capacity-limited decision making in biological and artificial agents.
Imitating Opponent to Win: Adversarial Policy Imitation Learning in Two-player Competitive Games
Bui, The Viet, Mai, Tien, Nguyen, Thanh H.
Recent research on vulnerabilities of deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown that adversarial policies adopted by an adversary agent can influence a target RL agent (victim agent) to perform poorly in a multi-agent environment. In existing studies, adversarial policies are directly trained based on experiences of interacting with the victim agent. There is a key shortcoming of this approach; knowledge derived from historical interactions may not be properly generalized to unexplored policy regions of the victim agent, making the trained adversarial policy significantly less effective. In this work, we design a new effective adversarial policy learning algorithm that overcomes this shortcoming. The core idea of our new algorithm is to create a new imitator to imitate the victim agent's policy while the adversarial policy will be trained not only based on interactions with the victim agent but also based on feedback from the imitator to forecast victim's intention. By doing so, we can leverage the capability of imitation learning in well capturing underlying characteristics of the victim policy only based on sample trajectories of the victim. Our victim imitation learning model differs from prior models as the environment's dynamics are driven by adversary's policy and will keep changing during the adversarial policy training. We provide a provable bound to guarantee a desired imitating policy when the adversary's policy becomes stable. We further strengthen our adversarial policy learning by making our imitator a stronger version of the victim. Finally, our extensive experiments using four competitive MuJoCo game environments show that our proposed adversarial policy learning algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.
Deciding What to Model: Value-Equivalent Sampling for Reinforcement Learning
Arumugam, Dilip, Van Roy, Benjamin
The quintessential model-based reinforcement-learning agent iteratively refines its estimates or prior beliefs about the true underlying model of the environment. Recent empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning with function approximation, however, eschew the true model in favor of a surrogate that, while ignoring various facets of the environment, still facilitates effective planning over behaviors. Recently formalized as the value equivalence principle, this algorithmic technique is perhaps unavoidable as real-world reinforcement learning demands consideration of a simple, computationally-bounded agent interacting with an overwhelmingly complex environment, whose underlying dynamics likely exceed the agent's capacity for representation. In this work, we consider the scenario where agent limitations may entirely preclude identifying an exactly value-equivalent model, immediately giving rise to a trade-off between identifying a model that is simple enough to learn while only incurring bounded sub-optimality. To address this problem, we introduce an algorithm that, using rate-distortion theory, iteratively computes an approximately-value-equivalent, lossy compression of the environment which an agent may feasibly target in lieu of the true model. We prove an information-theoretic, Bayesian regret bound for our algorithm that holds for any finite-horizon, episodic sequential decision-making problem. Crucially, our regret bound can be expressed in one of two possible forms, providing a performance guarantee for finding either the simplest model that achieves a desired sub-optimality gap or, alternatively, the best model given a limit on agent capacity.
BIMRL: Brain Inspired Meta Reinforcement Learning
Rohani, Seyed Roozbeh Razavi, Hedayatian, Saeed, Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
Sample efficiency has been a key issue in reinforcement learning (RL). An efficient agent must be able to leverage its prior experiences to quickly adapt to similar, but new tasks and situations. Meta-RL is one attempt at formalizing and addressing this issue. Inspired by recent progress in meta-RL, we introduce BIMRL, a novel multi-layer architecture along with a novel brain-inspired memory module that will help agents quickly adapt to new tasks within a few episodes. We also utilize this memory module to design a novel intrinsic reward that will guide the agent's exploration. Our architecture is inspired by findings in cognitive neuroscience and is compatible with the knowledge on connectivity and functionality of different regions in the brain. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our proposed method by competing with or surpassing the performance of some strong baselines on multiple MiniGrid environments.
DeFIX: Detecting and Fixing Failure Scenarios with Reinforcement Learning in Imitation Learning Based Autonomous Driving
Dagdanov, Resul, Eksen, Feyza, Durmus, Halil, Yurdakul, Ferhat, Ure, Nazim Kemal
Safely navigating through an urban environment without violating any traffic rules is a crucial performance target for reliable autonomous driving. In this paper, we present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methodology to DEtect and FIX (DeFIX) failures of an Imitation Learning (IL) agent by extracting infraction spots and re-constructing mini-scenarios on these infraction areas to train an RL agent for fixing the shortcomings of the IL approach. DeFIX is a continuous learning framework, where extraction of failure scenarios and training of RL agents are executed in an infinite loop. After each new policy is trained and added to the library of policies, a policy classifier method effectively decides on which policy to activate at each step during the evaluation. It is demonstrated that even with only one RL agent trained on failure scenario of an IL agent, DeFIX method is either competitive or does outperform state-of-the-art IL and RL based autonomous urban driving benchmarks. We trained and validated our approach on the most challenging map (Town05) of CARLA simulator which involves complex, realistic, and adversarial driving scenarios. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/data-and-decision-lab/DeFIX
LearningGroup: A Real-Time Sparse Training on FPGA via Learnable Weight Grouping for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Yang, Je, Kim, JaeUk, Kim, Joo-Young
Abstract--Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a powerful technology to construct interactive artificial intelligent systems in various applications such as multi-robot control and self-driving cars. Unlike supervised model or single-agent reinforcement learning, which actively exploits network pruning, it is obscure that how pruning will work in multi-agent reinforcement learning with its cooperative and interactive characteristics. MARL, which are 7.13 higher and 12.43 more energy efficient Most importantly, the accelerator shows speedup up to 12.52 for MARL requires up to 942.9 GFLOPS for effective realtime In addition, as the MARL system is I. Current CPU and GPU-based systems cannot learning, known for solving long-term decision-making problems meet the above requirements due to the lack of computing effectively. It aims to train the action policy, which is units, high power consumption or low utilization for small about how an agent should take actions based on the feedback batch sizes. Instead, FPGA is emerging as a new solution for from the given environment to maximize cumulative rewards. For example, Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that utilizes a the Xilinx U280 acceleration card provides robust computing deep neural network (DNN) as an action policy has been proposed potential through 9,024 DSPs over 41MB of on-chip BRAM [1]-[4]. Although DRL stands out in various domains while showing less power consumption than GPU. In addition, such as industrial control and robotics [5]-[7], all of them the reconfigurability of FPGA allows the optimization of are limited to a single agent. Other significant applications irregular data access and parallelism with customized compact have started to employ interaction between multiple agents, for data format, where these hardware overhead occurs in network instance, analysis of language communication and the network pruning to handle computation-bound applications. Hence, extending DRL to have In this paper, we propose a FPGA-based acceleration system many agents is critical for developing intelligent systems named LearningGroup, to yield high performance for where agents can interact with each other or even with people.
SupervisorBot: NLP-Annotated Real-Time Recommendations of Psychotherapy Treatment Strategies with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Lin, Baihan, Cecchi, Guillermo, Bouneffouf, Djallel
We propose a recommendation system that suggests treatment strategies to a therapist during the psychotherapy session in real-time. Our system uses a turn-level rating mechanism that predicts the therapeutic outcome by computing a similarity score between the deep embedding of a scoring inventory, and the current sentence that the patient is speaking. The system automatically transcribes a continuous audio stream and separates it into turns of the patient and of the therapist and perform real-time inference of their therapeutic working alliance. The dialogue pairs along with their computed working alliance as ratings are then fed into a deep reinforcement learning recommendation system where the sessions are treated as users and the topics are treated as items. Other than evaluating the empirical advantages of the core components on an existing dataset of psychotherapy sessions, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this system in a web app.
Reinforcement Learning in Health Care: Why It's Important and How It Can Help
At a TED Talk back in 2010, game designer and author Jane McGonigal argued that video games would help change the world for the better. While she may not have been referring to health and wellness specifically, recent developments in reinforcement learning (RL) for health care have rapidly turned parts of McGonigal's vision into reality. RL is simply a narrower subset of ML -- "the cherry on the cake" of artificial intelligence (AI), according to Facebook VP and Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun. The main difference is that instead of merely inspecting data, RL agents learn by interacting with their environments and earning rewards or penalties based on their actions. The agent interacts with this environment, which can change either through the agent's actions or on its own.