The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. As part of Microsoft's research into ways to use machine learning and AI to improve security defenses, the company has released an open source attack toolkit to let researchers create simulated network environments and see how they fare against attacks. Microsoft 365 Defender Research released CyberBattleSim, which creates a network simulation and models how threat actors can move laterally through the network looking for weak points. When building the attack simulation, enterprise defenders and researchers create various nodes on the network and indicate which services are running, which vulnerabilities are present, and what type of security controls are in place. Automated agents, representing threat actors, are deployed in the attack simulation to randomly execute actions as they try to take over the nodes. "The simulated attacker's goal is to take ownership of some portion of the network by exploiting these planted vulnerabilities.

A reinforcement learning environment with adversary agents is proposed in this work for pursuit-evasion game in the presence of fog of war, which is of both scientific significance and practical importance in aerospace applications. One of the most popular learning environments, StarCraft, is adopted here and the associated mini-games are analyzed to identify the current limitation for training adversary agents. The key contribution includes the analysis of the potential performance of an agent by incorporating control and differential game theory into the specific reinforcement learning environment, and the development of an adversary agents challenge (SAAC) environment by extending the current StarCraft mini-games. The subsequent study showcases the use of this learning environment and the effectiveness of an adversary agent for evasion units. Overall, the proposed SAAC environment should benefit pursuit-evasion studies with rapidly-emerging reinforcement learning technologies. Last but not least, the corresponding tutorial code can be found at GitHub.

Encouraging exploration is a critical issue in deep reinforcement learning. We investigate the effect of initial entropy that significantly influences the exploration, especially at the earlier stage. Our main observations are as follows: 1) low initial entropy increases the probability of learning failure, and 2) this initial entropy is biased towards a low value that inhibits exploration. Inspired by the investigations, we devise entropy-aware model initialization, a simple yet powerful learning strategy for effective exploration. We show that the devised learning strategy significantly reduces learning failures and enhances performance, stability, and learning speed through experiments.

Note: All of the code is in the form of snippets and will not work when executed alone. The full code can be found on my Github repo. Reinforcement learning is the training of an agent to make decisions in an environment. An agent is deployed in an environment. At any given frame, the agent must use data from the environment to act.

Before getting into Q-Learning, lets understand the importance concept of Exploration vs Exploitation. Exploration is trying new possibilities in order to find better rewards. Exploitation is to keep opting for same actions that has given some significant rewards in the past. To illustrate this we can consider an example of restaurants. Suppose i recently start living in a new city.

This paper describe an hybrid agent trained to play in Fantasy Football AI which participated in the Bot Bowl III competition. The agent, MimicBot, is implemented using a specifically designed deep policy network and trained using a combination of imitation and reinforcement learning. Previous attempts in using a reinforcement learning approach in such context failed for a number of reasons, e.g. due to the intrinsic randomness in the environment and the large and uneven number of actions available, with a curriculum learning approach failing to consistently beat a randomly paying agent. Currently no machine learning approach can beat a scripted bot which makes use of the domain knowledge on the game. Our solution, thanks to an imitation learning and a hybrid decision-making process, consistently beat such scripted agents. Moreover we shed lights on how to more efficiently train in a reinforcement learning setting while drastically increasing sample efficiency. MimicBot is the winner of the Bot Bowl III competition, and it is currently the state-of-the-art solution.

The ubiquitous availability of computing devices and the widespread use of the internet have generated a large amount of data continuously. Therefore, the amount of available information on any given topic is far beyond humans' processing capacity to properly process, causing what is known as information overload. To efficiently cope with large amounts of information and generate content with significant value to users, we require identifying, merging and summarising information. Data summaries can help gather related information and collect it into a shorter format that enables answering complicated questions, gaining new insight and discovering conceptual boundaries. This thesis focuses on three main challenges to alleviate information overload using novel summarisation techniques. It further intends to facilitate the analysis of documents to support personalised information extraction. This thesis separates the research issues into four areas, covering (i) feature engineering in document summarisation, (ii) traditional static and inflexible summaries, (iii) traditional generic summarisation approaches, and (iv) the need for reference summaries. We propose novel approaches to tackle these challenges, by: i)enabling automatic intelligent feature engineering, ii) enabling flexible and interactive summarisation, iii) utilising intelligent and personalised summarisation approaches. The experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed approaches compared to other state-of-the-art models. We further propose solutions to the information overload problem in different domains through summarisation, covering network traffic data, health data and business process data.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Many systems like autonomous vehicle fleets and drone swarms can be modeled as Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) tasks, which deal with how multiple machines can learn to collaborate, coordinate, compete, and collectively learn. It's been shown that machine learning algorithms -- particularly reinforcement learning algorithms -- are well-suited to MARL tasks. But it's often challenging to efficiently scale them up to hundreds or even thousands of machines. One solution is a technique called centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE), which allows an algorithm to train using data from multiple machines but make predictions for each machine individually (e.g., like when a driverless car should turn left).

Reinforcement learning has become one of the most trending subjects in the recent decade. It has seen applications in various fields such as robot manipulations, autonomous driving, path planning, computer gaming, etc. We accomplished three tasks during the course of this project. Firstly, we studied the Q-learning algorithm for tabular environments and applied it successfully to an OpenAi Gym environment, Taxi. Secondly, we gained an understanding of and implemented the deep Q-network algorithm for Cart-Pole environment. Thirdly, we also studied the application of reinforcement learning in autonomous driving and its combination with safety check constraints (safety controllers). We trained a rough autonomous driving agent using highway-gym environment and explored the effects of various environment configurations like reward functions on the agent training performance.

Recommender system plays a crucial role in modern E-commerce platform. Due to the lack of historical interactions between users and items, cold-start recommendation is a challenging problem. In order to alleviate the cold-start issue, most existing methods introduce content and contextual information as the auxiliary information. Nevertheless, these methods assume the recommended items behave steadily over time, while in a typical E-commerce scenario, items generally have very different performances throughout their life period. In such a situation, it would be beneficial to consider the long-term return from the item perspective, which is usually ignored in conventional methods. Reinforcement learning (RL) naturally fits such a long-term optimization problem, in which the recommender could identify high potential items, proactively allocate more user impressions to boost their growth, therefore improve the multi-period cumulative gains. Inspired by this idea, we model the process as a Partially Observable and Controllable Markov Decision Process (POC-MDP), and propose an actor-critic RL framework (RL-LTV) to incorporate the item lifetime values (LTV) into the recommendation. In RL-LTV, the critic studies historical trajectories of items and predict the future LTV of fresh item, while the actor suggests a score-based policy which maximizes the future LTV expectation. Scores suggested by the actor are then combined with classical ranking scores in a dual-rank framework, therefore the recommendation is balanced with the LTV consideration. Our method outperforms the strong live baseline with a relative improvement of 8.67% and 18.03% on IPV and GMV of cold-start items, on one of the largest E-commerce platform.