Accelerating the learning processes for complex tasks by leveraging previously learned tasks has been one of the most challenging problems in reinforcement learning, especially when the similarity between source and target tasks is low or unknown. In this work, we propose a REPresentation-And-INstance Transfer algorithm (REPAINT) for deep actor-critic reinforcement learning paradigm. In representation transfer, we adopt a kickstarted training method using a pre-trained teacher policy by introducing an auxiliary cross-entropy loss. In instance transfer, we develop a sampling approach, i.e., advantage-based experience replay, on transitions collected following the teacher policy, where only the samples with high advantage estimates are retained for policy update. We consider both learning an unseen target task by transferring from previously learned teacher tasks and learning a partially unseen task composed of multiple sub-tasks by transferring from a pre-learned teacher sub-task. In several benchmark experiments, REPAINT significantly reduces the total training time and improves the asymptotic performance compared to training with no prior knowledge and other baselines.

The IEEE Very Small Size Soccer (VSSS) is a robot soccer competition in which two teams of three small robots play against each other. Traditionally, a deterministic coach agent will choose the most suitable strategy and formation for each adversary's strategy. Therefore, the role of a coach is of great importance to the game. In this sense, this paper proposes an end-to-end approach for the coaching task based on Reinforcement Learning (RL). The proposed system processes the information during the simulated matches to learn an optimal policy that chooses the current formation, depending on the opponent and game conditions. We trained two RL policies against three different teams (balanced, offensive, and heavily offensive) in a simulated environment. Our results were assessed against one of the top teams of the VSSS league, showing promising results after achieving a win/loss ratio of approximately 2.0.

This paper introduces an information-theoretic constraint on learned policy complexity in the Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) reinforcement learning algorithm. Previous research with a related approach in continuous control experiments suggests that this method favors learning policies that are more robust to changing environment dynamics. The multi-agent game setting naturally requires this type of robustness, as other agents' policies change throughout learning, introducing a nonstationary environment. For this reason, recent methods in continual learning are compared to our approach, termed Capacity-Limited MADDPG. Results from experimentation in multi-agent cooperative and competitive tasks demonstrate that the capacity-limited approach is a good candidate for improving learning performance in these environments.

Designing efficient algorithms that learn and plan in sequential decision-making tasks with large state and action spaces has become a central task of modern reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. RL often assumes the environment as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), described by a tuple of state space, action space, reward function, and transition probability function. Due to a large number of possible states and actions, traditional tabular reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning (Watkins, 1989), which directly access each state-action pair, are computationally intractable. A common approach to cope with high-dimensional state and action spaces is to utilize feature mappings such as linear functions or neural networks to map states and actions to a low-dimensional space. Recently, a large body of literature has been devoted to provide regret bounds for online RL with linear function approximation. These works can be divided into two main categories. The first category of works is of model-free style, which directly parameterizes the action-value function as a linear function of some given feature mapping. For instance, Jin et al. (2020) studied the episodic MDPs with linear MDP assumption, which assumes that both transition probability function and reward function can be represented as a linear function of a given feature mapping.

Knowledge distillation between machine learning models has opened many new avenues for parameter count reduction, performance improvements, or amortizing training time when changing architectures between the teacher and student network. In the case of reinforcement learning, this technique has also been applied to distill teacher policies to students. Until now, policy distillation required access to a simulator or real world trajectories. In this paper we introduce a simulator-free approach to knowledge distillation in the context of reinforcement learning. A key challenge is having the student learn the multiplicity of cases that correspond to a given action. While prior work has shown that data-free knowledge distillation is possible with supervised learning models by generating synthetic examples, these approaches to are vulnerable to only producing a single prototype example for each class. We propose an extension to explicitly handle multiple observations per output class that seeks to find as many exemplars as possible for a given output class by reinitializing our data generator and making use of an adversarial loss. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of simulator-free knowledge distillation between a teacher and a student policy. This new approach improves over the state of the art on data-free learning of student networks on benchmark datasets (MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10), and we also demonstrate that it specifically tackles issues with multiple input modes. We also identify open problems when distilling agents trained in high dimensional environments such as Pong, Breakout, or Seaquest.

The emerging vision-and-language navigation (VLN) problem aims at learning to navigate an agent to the target location in unseen photo-realistic environments according to the given language instruction. The main challenges of VLN arise mainly from two aspects: first, the agent needs to attend to the meaningful paragraphs of the language instruction corresponding to the dynamically-varying visual environments; second, during the training process, the agent usually imitate the shortest-path to the target location. Due to the discrepancy of action selection between training and inference, the agent solely on the basis of imitation learning does not perform well. Sampling the next action from its predicted probability distribution during the training process allows the agent to explore diverse routes from the environments, yielding higher success rates. Nevertheless, without being presented with the shortest navigation paths during the training process, the agent may arrive at the target location through an unexpected longer route. To overcome these challenges, we design a cross-modal grounding module, which is composed of two complementary attention mechanisms, to equip the agent with a better ability to track the correspondence between the textual and visual modalities. We then propose to recursively alternate the learning schemes of imitation and exploration to narrow the discrepancy between training and inference. We further exploit the advantages of both these two learning schemes via adversarial learning. Extensive experimental results on the Room-to-Room (R2R) benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed learning scheme is generalized and complementary to prior arts. Our method performs well against state-of-the-art approaches in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Reinforcement Learning(RL) provides solutions to a sequential decision making problem or a problem that can be re-structured as sequential in nature. Such puzzles do not depend on a single decision made at a certain point in time but on an entire sequence of trailing choices -- an example of this is treatment procedures in healthcare. It is desirable to run RL systems in the real world and have real benefits. This is something that has seen growing application success, but with its own set of challenges. This post explores exciting applications of RL in the real world that promise to give beneficial use cases, as discussed in this year's RL for real-life workshop.

Online Courses Udemy - Complete guide to Reinforcement Learning, with Stock Trading and Online Advertising Applications BESTSELLER Created by Lazy Programmer Team, Lazy Programmer Inc English [Auto-generated], French [Auto-generated], 4 more Students also bought Data Science: Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning in Python Deep Learning Prerequisites: Linear Regression in Python Cluster Analysis and Unsupervised Machine Learning in Python Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from zero to hero in Python3 Preview this course GET COUPON CODE Description When people talk about artificial intelligence, they usually don't mean supervised and unsupervised machine learning. These tasks are pretty trivial compared to what we think of AIs doing - playing chess and Go, driving cars, and beating video games at a superhuman level. Reinforcement learning has recently become popular for doing all of that and more. Much like deep learning, a lot of the theory was discovered in the 70s and 80s but it hasn't been until recently that we've been able to observe first hand the amazing results that are possible. In 2016 we saw Google's AlphaGo beat the world Champion in Go.

Typical reinforcement learning (RL) methods show limited applicability for real-world industrial control problems because industrial systems involve various constraints and simultaneously require continuous and discrete control. To overcome these challenges, we devise a novel RL algorithm that enables an agent to handle a highly constrained action space. This algorithm has two main features. First, we devise two distance-based Q-value update schemes, incentive update and penalty update, in a distance-based incentive/penalty update technique to enable the agent to decide discrete and continuous actions in the feasible region and to update the value of these types of actions. Second, we propose a method for defining the penalty cost as a shadow price-weighted penalty. This approach affords two advantages compared to previous methods to efficiently induce the agent to not select an infeasible action. We apply our algorithm to an industrial control problem, microgrid system operation, and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority.

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find a policy that maximizes reward in infinite-horizon problem settings. The attacker can manipulate the rewards and the transition dynamics in the learning environment at training-time, and is interested in doing so in a stealthy manner. We propose an optimization framework for finding an optimal stealthy attack for different measures of attack cost. We provide lower/upper bounds on the attack cost, and instantiate our attacks in two settings: (i) an offline setting where the agent is doing planning in the poisoned environment, and (ii) an online setting where the agent is learning a policy with poisoned feedback. Our results show that the attacker can easily succeed in teaching any target policy to the victim under mild conditions and highlight a significant security threat to reinforcement learning agents in practice.