Cyber attacks are increasing in volume, frequency, and complexity. In response, the security community is looking toward fully automating cyber defense systems using machine learning. However, so far the resultant effects on the coevolutionary dynamics of attackers and defenders have not been examined. In this whitepaper, we hypothesise that increased automation on both sides will accelerate the coevolutionary cycle, thus begging the question of whether there are any resultant fixed points, and how they are characterised. Working within the threat model of Locked Shields, Europe's largest cyberdefense exercise, we study blackbox adversarial attacks on network classifiers. Given already existing attack capabilities, we question the utility of optimal evasion attack frameworks based on minimal evasion distances. Instead, we suggest a novel reinforcement learning setting that can be used to efficiently generate arbitrary adversarial perturbations. We then argue that attacker-defender fixed points are themselves general-sum games with complex phase transitions, and introduce a temporally extended multi-agent reinforcement learning framework in which the resultant dynamics can be studied. We hypothesise that one plausible fixed point of AI-NIDS may be a scenario where the defense strategy relies heavily on whitelisted feature flow subspaces. Finally, we demonstrate that a continual learning approach is required to study attacker-defender dynamics in temporally extended general-sum games.

Collaborative deep reinforcement learning (CDRL) algorithms in which multiple agents can coordinate over a wireless network is a promising approach to enable future intelligent and autonomous systems that rely on real-time decision-making in complex dynamic environments. Nonetheless, in practical scenarios, CDRL faces many challenges due to the heterogeneity of agents and their learning tasks, different environments, time constraints of the learning, and resource limitations of wireless networks. To address these challenges, in this paper, a novel semantic-aware CDRL method is proposed to enable a group of heterogeneous untrained agents with semantically-linked DRL tasks to collaborate efficiently across a resource-constrained wireless cellular network. To this end, a new heterogeneous federated DRL (HFDRL) algorithm is proposed to select the best subset of semantically relevant DRL agents for collaboration. The proposed approach then jointly optimizes the training loss and wireless bandwidth allocation for the cooperating selected agents in order to train each agent within the time limit of its real-time task. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

GPU compilers are complex software programs with many optimizations specific to target hardware. These optimizations are often controlled by heuristics hand-designed by compiler experts using time- and resource-intensive processes. In this paper, we developed a GPU compiler autotuning framework that uses off-policy deep reinforcement learning to generate heuristics that improve the frame rates of graphics applications. Furthermore, we demonstrate the resilience of these learned heuristics to frequent compiler updates by analyzing their stability across a year of code check-ins without retraining. We show that our machine learning-based compiler autotuning framework matches or surpasses the frame rates for 98% of graphics benchmarks with an average uplift of 1.6% up to 15.8%.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework for learning decision-making from offline data and therefore constitutes a promising approach for real-world applications as automated driving. Self-driving vehicles (SDV) learn a policy, which potentially even outperforms the behavior in the sub-optimal data set. Especially in safety-critical applications as automated driving, explainability and transferability are key to success. This motivates the use of model-based offline RL approaches, which leverage planning. However, current state-of-the-art methods often neglect the influence of aleatoric uncertainty arising from the stochastic behavior of multi-agent systems. This work proposes a novel approach for Uncertainty-aware Model-Based Offline REinforcement Learning Leveraging plAnning (UMBRELLA), which solves the prediction, planning, and control problem of the SDV jointly in an interpretable learning-based fashion. A trained action-conditioned stochastic dynamics model captures distinctively different future evolutions of the traffic scene. The analysis provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of our approach in challenging automated driving simulations and based on a real-world public dataset.

How to extract as much learning signal from each trajectory data has been a key problem in reinforcement learning (RL), where sample inefficiency has posed serious challenges for practical applications. Recent works have shown that using expressive policy function approximators and conditioning on future trajectory information -- such as future states in hindsight experience replay or returns-to-go in Decision Transformer (DT) -- enables efficient learning of multi-task policies, where at times online RL is fully replaced by offline behavioral cloning, e.g. sequence modeling. We demonstrate that all these approaches are doing hindsight information matching (HIM) -- training policies that can output the rest of trajectory that matches some statistics of future state information. We present Generalized Decision Transformer (GDT) for solving any HIM problem, and show how different choices for the feature function and the anti-causal aggregator not only recover DT as a special case, but also lead to novel Categorical DT (CDT) and Bi-directional DT (BDT) for matching different statistics of the future. For evaluating CDT and BDT, we define offline multi-task state-marginal matching (SMM) and imitation learning (IL) as two generic HIM problems, propose a Wasserstein distance loss as a metric for both, and empirically study them on MuJoCo continuous control benchmarks. CDT, which simply replaces anti-causal summation with anti-causal binning in DT, enables the first effective offline multi-task SMM algorithm that generalizes well to unseen and even synthetic multi-modal state-feature distributions. BDT, which uses an anti-causal second transformer as the aggregator, can learn to model any statistics of the future and outperforms DT variants in offline multi-task IL. Our generalized formulations from HIM and GDT greatly expand the role of powerful sequence modeling architectures in modern RL.

Automatic summarization of legal texts is an important and still a challenging task since legal documents are often long and complicated with unusual structures and styles. Recent advances of deep models trained end-to-end with differentiable losses can well-summarize natural text, yet when applied to the legal domain, they show limited results. In this paper, we propose to use reinforcement learning to train current deep summarization models to improve their performance in the legal domain. To this end, we adopt proximal policy optimization methods and introduce novel reward functions that encourage the generation of candidate summaries satisfying both lexical and semantic criteria. We apply our method to training different summarization backbones and observe a consistent and significant performance gain across three public legal datasets.

This article aims to provide you with sufficient knowledge of the most important type of machine learning, i.e., reinforcement learning. Reinforcement Learning is based on a self-learning mechanism (i.e. it does not need extra data and training resources). So, you might be thinking without data how machines are going to learn. In Reinforcement Learning the machines learn with interactive feedback. They did some job and the user provides feedback for the same, if the feedback is positive the machine continues that work and if the feedback is negative the machine changes the work.

We report a bio-inspired framework for training a neural network through reinforcement learning to induce high level functions within the network. Based on the interpretation that animals have gained their cognitive functions such as object recognition -- without ever being specifically trained for -- as a result of maximizing their fitness to the environment, we place our agent in an environment where developing certain functions may facilitate decision making. The experimental results show that high level functions, such as image classification and hidden variable estimation, can be naturally and simultaneously induced without any pre-training or specifying them.

In this work we investigate a specific transfer learning approach for deep reinforcement learning in the context where the internal dynamics between two tasks are the same but the visual representations differ. We learn a low-dimensional encoding of the environment, meant to capture summarizing abstractions, from which the internal dynamics and value functions are learned. Transfer is then obtained by freezing the learned internal dynamics and value functions, thus reusing the shared low-dimensional embedding space. When retraining the encoder for transfer, we make several observations: (i) in some cases, there are local minima that have small losses but a mismatching embedding space, resulting in poor task performance and (ii) in the absence of local minima, the output of the encoder converges in our experiments to the same embedding space, which leads to a fast and efficient transfer as compared to learning from scratch. The local minima are caused by the reduced degree of freedom of the optimization process caused by the frozen models. We also find that the transfer performance is heavily reliant on the base model; some base models often result in a successful transfer, whereas other base models often result in a failing transfer.

Reinforcement learning (RL) dedicates to solve the sequential decision making problem, where an agent is interacting with an unknown environment to find the best policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards (Sutton & Barto, 2018). It is known that the tabular algorithms direct controlling over the original state and action achieve the minimax-optimal regret depending on the cardinality of the state and action space (Jaksch et al., 2010; Osband & Van Roy, 2016; Azar et al., 2017; Jin et al., 2018). However, these algorithms become intractable for the real-world problems with an enormous number of states, due to the curse of dimensionality. Learning with function approximation upon good representation is a natural idea to tackle the curse and serving as the key for the success of deep learning (Bengio et al., 2013). In fact, representation learning lies at the heart of the empirical successes of deep RL in video games (Mnih et al., 2013), robotics (Levine et al., 2016), Go (Silver et al., 2017), dialogue systems (Jiang et al., 2021) to name a few. Meanwhile, the importance and benefits of the representation in RL is rigorously justified (Jin et al.,