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 Reinforcement Learning


Count-Based Temperature Scheduling for Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) algorithms such as Soft Q-Learning (SQL) and Soft Actor-Critic trade off reward and policy entropy, which has the potential to improve training stability and robustness. Most MaxEnt RL methods, however, use a constant tradeoff coefficient (temperature), contrary to the intuition that the temperature should be high early in training to avoid overfitting to noisy value estimates and decrease later in training as we increasingly trust high value estimates to truly lead to good rewards. Moreover, our confidence in value estimates is state-dependent, increasing every time we use more evidence to update an estimate. In this paper, we present a simple state-based temperature scheduling approach, and instantiate it for SQL as Count-Based Soft Q-Learning (CBSQL). We evaluate our approach on a toy domain as well as in several Atari 2600 domains and show promising results.


How do we know AI is ready to be in the wild? Maybe a critic is needed

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Mischief can happen when AI is let loose in the world, just like any technology. The examples of AI gone wrong are numerous, the most vivid in recent memory being the disastrously bad performance of Amazon's facial recognition technology, Rekognition, which had a propensity to erroneously match members of some ethnic groups with criminal mugshots to a disproportionate extent. Given the risk, how can society know if a technology has been adequately refined to a level where it is safe to deploy? "This is a really good question, and one we are actively working on," Sergey Levine, assistant professor with the University of California at Berkeley's department of electrical engineering and computer science, told ZDNet by email this week. Levine and colleagues have been working on an approach to machine learning where the decisions of a software program are subjected to a critique by another algorithm within the same program that acts adversarially.


A non trivial elevator control system in a train station by reinforcement learning

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Today's urban life is out of imagination without the presence of elevators and the elevator controller algorithm has been well studied by different techniques including reinforcement learning [1]. A glance over the references gave the impression that the majority of studies has focused on elevators installed in high-rise buildings while those in train stations are barely discussed. Elevators in train stations, however, deserve their own attention because of their obvious difference from systems in buildings. A good example is the Gare de Lyon in Paris, a station with 2 underground floors on which you find 2 different train lines' platforms respectively. From my personal experience, it usually takes quite a while to get to floor -2 from floor -1 for a train change with my baby stroller by elevator.


Generate plane quad mesh with neural networks and tree search

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The quality of mesh generation has long been considered a vital aspect in providing engineers with reliable simulation results throughout the history of the Finite Element Method (FEM). The element extraction method, which is currently the most robust method, is used in business software. However, in order to speed up extraction, the approach is done by finding the next element that optimizes a target function, which can result in local mesh of bad quality after many time steps. We provide TreeMesh, a method that uses this method in conjunction with reinforcement learning (also possible with supervised learning) and a novel Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) (Coulom(2006), Kocsis and Szepesv\'ari(2006), Browne et~al.(2012)). The algorithm is based on a previously proposed approach (Pan et~al.(2021)). After making many improvements on DRL (algorithm, state-action-reward setting) and adding a MCTS, it outperforms the former work on the same boundary. Furthermore, using tree search, our program reveals much preponderance on seed-density-changing boundaries, which is common on thin-film materials.


Deep Q-Learning based Reinforcement Learning Approach for Network Intrusion Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rise of the new generation of cyber threats demands more sophisticated and intelligent cyber defense solutions equipped with autonomous agents capable of learning to make decisions without the knowledge of human experts. Several reinforcement learning methods (e.g., Markov) for automated network intrusion tasks have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we introduce a new generation of network intrusion detection methods that combines a Q-learning-based reinforcement learning with a deep-feed forward neural network method for network intrusion detection. Our proposed Deep Q-Learning (DQL) model provides an ongoing auto-learning capability for a network environment that can detect different types of network intrusions using an automated trial-error approach and continuously enhance its detection capabilities. We provide the details of fine-tuning different hyperparameters involved in the DQL model for more effective self-learning. According to our extensive experimental results based on the NSL-KDD dataset, we confirm that the lower discount factor which is set as 0.001 under 250 episodes of training yields the best performance results. Our experimental results also show that our proposed DQL is highly effective in detecting different intrusion classes and outperforms other similar machine learning approaches.


70-Page Paper From Yoshua Bengio Team: GFlowNet Foundations

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There's no slowing down the godfathers of deep learning, who continue to innovate. Several years ago Geoffrey Hinton introduced Capsule Networks (CapsNets) for dynamic image modelling, and this past summer a Yoshua Bengio team proposed Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a low-network-based generative method that can turn a given positive reward into a generative policy that samples with a probability proportional to the return. GFlowNets achieve competitive results on molecule synthesis domain tasks and perform well on a simple domain where there are many modes to the reward function. In the new paper GFlowNet Foundations, a research team from Mila, University of Montreal, McGill University, Stanford University, CIFAR and Microsoft Azure AI builds upon GFlowNets, providing an in-depth formal foundation and expansion of the set of theoretical results for a broad range of scenarios, especially active learning. GFlowNets are inspired by the way information propagates in temporal-difference reinforcement learning.


CoRL 2020, Spotlight Talk 439: Deep Reactive Planning in Dynamic Environments

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While goal conditioning of policies has been studied in the RL literature, such approaches are not easily extended to settings where the robot's goal can change during execution. This is something that humans are naturally able to do. However, it is difficult for robots to learn such reflexes (i.e., to naturally respond to dynamic environments), especially when the goal location is not explicitly provided to the robot, and instead needs to be perceived through a vision sensor. In the current work, we present a method that can achieve such behavior by combining traditional kinematic planning, deep learning, and deep reinforcement learning in a synergistic fashion to generalize to arbitrary environments. We demonstrate the proposed approach for several reaching and pick-and-place tasks in simulation, as well as on a real system of a 6-DoF industrial manipulator."


AI art

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State-of-the-art machine learning solutions made quick and easy to build.We solve real business problems by combining machine learning & art "If you want to know what's going on in the world, ask a machine" MLearning.ai is a platform for machine learning art solutions with the intention to make the creative industries more productive. Our platform offers a marketplace for machine learning-driven creative services with a step-by-step solution to transform the process of creating and designing. Our platform uses computational techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning to provide creative services that solve complex problems more efficiently. Machine Learning creates new algorithms for product design, based on human behaviors.


A Q-learning algorithm to generate shots for walking robots in soccer simulations

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RoboCup, originally named the J-League, is an annual robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) competition organized by the International RoboCup Federation. During RoboCup, robots compete with other robots soccer tournaments. The idea for the competition originated in 1992, when Professor Alan Mackworth at University of British Columbia in Canada wrote a paper entitled "On Seeing Robots." In 1993, a research team in Japan drew inspiration from this paper to organize the first robot soccer competition. While RoboCup can be highly entertaining, its main objective is to showcase advancements in robotics and AI in a real-world setting.


A Reinforcement Learning Approach for the Continuous Electricity Market of Germany: Trading from the Perspective of a Wind Park Operator

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the rising extension of renewable energies, the intraday electricity markets have recorded a growing popularity amongst traders as well as electric utilities to cope with the induced volatility of the energy supply. Through their short trading horizon and continuous nature, the intraday markets offer the ability to adjust trading decisions from the day-ahead market or reduce trading risk in a short-term notice. Producers of renewable energies utilize the intraday market to lower their forecast risk, by modifying their provided capacities based on current forecasts. However, the market dynamics are complex due to the fact that the power grids have to remain stable and electricity is only partly storable. Consequently, robust and intelligent trading strategies are required that are capable to operate in the intraday market. In this work, we propose a novel autonomous trading approach based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms as a possible solution. For this purpose, we model the intraday trade as a Markov Decision Problem (MDP) and employ the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm as our DRL approach. A simulation framework is introduced that enables the trading of the continuous intraday price in a resolution of one minute steps. We test our framework in a case study from the perspective of a wind park operator. We include next to general trade information both price and wind forecasts. On a test scenario of German intraday trading results from 2018, we are able to outperform multiple baselines with at least 45.24% improvement, showing the advantage of the DRL algorithm. However, we also discuss limitations and enhancements of the DRL agent, in order to increase the performance in future works.