Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement Learning For Survival, A Clinically Motivated Method For Critically Ill Patients
Whilst just using terminal rewards does make sense directly from observational data. However, there as a clinical objective, such sparse reward choices induce is significant ambiguity on the control objective high sample complexity, and all RL applications to medicine and on the best reward choice for the standard RL are performed in an offline manner, using a fixed dataset of objective. In this work, we propose a clinically observed trajectories. In particular, for complex syndromes motivated control objective for critically ill patients, such as sepsis, given the enormous heterogeneity and complexities for which the value functions have a simple amongst patient trajectories, it is very unlikely that medical interpretation. Further, we present theoretical the extent and the variety of the currently available data results and adapt our method to a practical will cover the feasible range of physiologic states in any Deep RL algorithm, which can be used alongside case. Further, it is well known that even survivors face a any value based Deep RL method. We experiment significant readmission risk and a reduced life expectancy on a large sepsis cohort and show that our (Cuthbertson et al., 2013; Gritte et al., 2021). Therefore, not method produces results consistent with clinical all survivors are the same, and we may have to consider the knowledge.
On the link between conscious function and general intelligence in humans and machines
Juliani, Arthur, Arulkumaran, Kai, Sasai, Shuntaro, Kanai, Ryota
In popular media, there is often a connection drawn between the advent of awareness in artificial agents and those same agents simultaneously achieving human or superhuman level intelligence. In this work, we explore the validity and potential application of this seemingly intuitive link between consciousness and intelligence. We do so by examining the cognitive abilities associated with three contemporary theories of conscious function: Global Workspace Theory (GWT), Information Generation Theory (IGT), and Attention Schema Theory (AST). We find that all three theories specifically relate conscious function to some aspect of domain-general intelligence in humans. With this insight, we turn to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and find that, while still far from demonstrating general intelligence, many state-of-the-art deep learning methods have begun to incorporate key aspects of each of the three functional theories. Having identified this trend, we use the motivating example of mental time travel in humans to propose ways in which insights from each of the three theories may be combined into a single unified and implementable model. Given that it is made possible by cognitive abilities underlying each of the three functional theories, artificial agents capable of mental time travel would not only possess greater general intelligence than current approaches, but also be more consistent with our current understanding of the functional role of consciousness in humans, thus making it a promising near-term goal for AI research.
This robot dog just taught itself to walk
The team's algorithm, called Dreamer, uses past experiences to build up a model of the surrounding world. Dreamer also allows the robot to conduct trial-and-error calculations in a computer program as opposed to the real world, by predicting potential future outcomes of its potential actions. This allows it to learn faster than it could purely by doing. Once the robot had learned to walk, it kept learning to adapt to unexpected situations, such as resisting being toppled by a stick. "Teaching robots through trial and error is a difficult problem, made even harder by the long training times such teaching requires," says Lerrel Pinto, an assistant professor of computer science at New York University, who specializes in robotics and machine learning.
Online Learning with Off-Policy Feedback
Gabbianelli, Germano, Papini, Matteo, Neu, Gergely
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead sees the ones obtained by another unknown policy run in parallel (behavior policy). Instead of a standard exploration-exploitation dilemma, the learner has to face another challenge in this setting: due to limited observations outside of their control, the learner may not be able to estimate the value of each policy equally well. To address this issue, we propose a set of algorithms that guarantee regret bounds that scale with a natural notion of mismatch between any comparator policy and the behavior policy, achieving improved performance against comparators that are well-covered by the observations. We also provide an extension to the setting of adversarial linear contextual bandits, and verify the theoretical guarantees via a set of experiments. Our key algorithmic idea is adapting the notion of pessimistic reward estimators that has been recently popular in the context of off-policy reinforcement learning.
MAD for Robust Reinforcement Learning in Machine Translation
Donato, Domenic, Yu, Lei, Ling, Wang, Dyer, Chris
We introduce a new distributed policy gradient algorithm and show that it outperforms existing reward-aware training procedures such as REINFORCE, minimum risk training (MRT) and proximal policy optimization (PPO) in terms of training stability and generalization performance when optimizing machine translation models. Our algorithm, which we call MAD (on account of using the mean absolute deviation in the importance weighting calculation), has distributed data generators sampling multiple candidates per source sentence on worker nodes, while a central learner updates the policy. MAD depends crucially on two variance reduction strategies: (1) a conditional reward normalization method that ensures each source sentence has both positive and negative reward translation examples and (2) a new robust importance weighting scheme that acts as a conditional entropy regularizer. Experiments on a variety of translation tasks show that policies learned using the MAD algorithm perform very well when using both greedy decoding and beam search, and that the learned policies are sensitive to the specific reward used during training.
Self-Supervised Learning for Joint Pushing and Grasping Policies in Highly Cluttered Environments
Mokhtar, Kamal, Heemskerk, Cock, Kasaei, Hamidreza
Abstract-- Robots often face situations where grasping a goal object is desirable but not feasible due to other present objects preventing the grasp action. We present a deep Reinforcement Learning approach to learn grasping and pushing policies for manipulating a goal object in highly cluttered environments to address this problem. In particular, a dual Reinforcement Learning model approach is proposed, which presents high resilience in handling complicated scenes, reaching an average of 98% task completion using primitive objects in a simulation environment. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we performed two extensive sets of experiments in packed objects and a pile of object scenarios with a total of 1000 test runs in simulation. Experimental results showed that the proposed method worked very well in both scenarios and outperformed the recent state-of-the-art approaches. Demo video, trained models, and source code for the results reproducibility purpose are publicly available. Grasping is a crucial skill for many robotics applications. It further opens opportunities to robots to numerous skills that are not This paper mainly focuses on self-supervised learning for attainable without a versed object's grasp. In many scenarios, pushing and grasping objects in highly cluttered environments objects do not appear in isolation, and therefore, grasping via deep Reinforcement Learning (RL).
An Enhanced Graph Representation for Machine Learning Based Automatic Intersection Management
Klimke, Marvin, Gerigk, Jasper, Vรถlz, Benjamin, Buchholz, Michael
The improvement of traffic efficiency at urban intersections receives strong research interest in the field of automated intersection management. So far, mostly non-learning algorithms like reservation or optimization-based ones were proposed to solve the underlying multi-agent planning problem. At the same time, automated driving functions for a single ego vehicle are increasingly implemented using machine learning methods. In this work, we build upon a previously presented graph-based scene representation and graph neural network to approach the problem using reinforcement learning. The scene representation is improved in key aspects by using edge features in addition to the existing node features for the vehicles. This leads to an increased representation quality that is leveraged by an updated network architecture. The paper provides an in-depth evaluation of the proposed method against baselines that are commonly used in automatic intersection management. Compared to a traditional signalized intersection and an enhanced first-in-first-out scheme, a significant reduction of induced delay is observed at varying traffic densities. Finally, the generalization capability of the graph-based representation is evaluated by testing the policy on intersection layouts not seen during training. The model generalizes virtually without restrictions to smaller intersection layouts and within certain limits to larger ones.
Back to the Manifold: Recovering from Out-of-Distribution States
Reichlin, Alfredo, Marchetti, Giovanni Luca, Yin, Hang, Ghadirzadeh, Ali, Kragic, Danica
Learning from previously collected datasets of expert data offers the promise of acquiring robotic policies without unsafe and costly online explorations. However, a major challenge is a distributional shift between the states in the training dataset and the ones visited by the learned policy at the test time. While prior works mainly studied the distribution shift caused by the policy during the offline training, the problem of recovering from out-of-distribution states at the deployment time is not very well studied yet. We alleviate the distributional shift at the deployment time by introducing a recovery policy that brings the agent back to the training manifold whenever it steps out of the in-distribution states, e.g., due to an external perturbation. The recovery policy relies on an approximation of the training data density and a learned equivariant mapping that maps visual observations into a latent space in which translations correspond to the robot actions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through several manipulation experiments on a real robotic platform. Our results show that the recovery policy enables the agent to complete tasks while the behavioral cloning alone fails because of the distributional shift problem.
Inspector: Pixel-Based Automated Game Testing via Exploration, Detection, and Investigation
Liu, Guoqing, Cai, Mengzhang, Zhao, Li, Qin, Tao, Brown, Adrian, Bischoff, Jimmy, Liu, Tie-Yan
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has attracted much attention in automated game testing. Early attempts rely on game internal information for game space exploration, thus requiring deep integration with games, which is inconvenient for practical applications. In this work, we propose using only screenshots/pixels as input for automated game testing and build a general game testing agent, Inspector, that can be easily applied to different games without deep integration with games. In addition to covering all game space for testing, our agent tries to take human-like behaviors to interact with key objects in a game, since some bugs usually happen in player-object interactions. Inspector is based on purely pixel inputs and comprises three key modules: game space explorer, key object detector, and human-like object investigator. Game space explorer aims to explore the whole game space by using a curiosity-based reward function with pixel inputs. Key object detector aims to detect key objects in a game, based on a small number of labeled screenshots. Human-like object investigator aims to mimic human behaviors for investigating key objects via imitation learning. We conduct experiments on two popular video games: Shooter Game and Action RPG Game. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of Inspector in exploring game space, detecting key objects, and investigating objects. Moreover, Inspector successfully discovers two potential bugs in those two games. The demo video of Inspector is available at https://github.com/Inspector-GameTesting/Inspector-GameTesting.
Boolean Decision Rules for Reinforcement Learning Policy Summarisation
McCarthy, James, Nair, Rahul, Daly, Elizabeth, Marinescu, Radu, Dusparic, Ivana
Explainability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies remains a challenging research problem, particularly when considering RL in a safety context. Understanding the decisions and intentions of an RL policy offer avenues to incorporate safety into the policy by limiting undesirable actions. We propose the use of a Boolean Decision Rules model to create a post-hoc rule-based summary of an agent's policy. We evaluate our proposed approach using a DQN agent trained on an implementation of a lava gridworld and show that, given a hand-crafted feature representation of this gridworld, simple generalised rules can be created, giving a post-hoc explainable summary of the agent's policy. We discuss possible avenues to introduce safety into a RL agent's policy by using rules generated by this rule-based model as constraints imposed on the agent's policy, as well as discuss how creating simple rule summaries of an agent's policy may help in the debugging process of RL agents.