Reinforcement Learning
AWAC: Accelerating online reinforcement learning with offline datasets
Robots trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have the potential to be used across a huge variety of challenging real world problems. To apply RL to a new problem, you typically set up the environment, define a reward function, and train the robot to solve the task by allowing it to explore the new environment from scratch. While this may eventually work, these "online" RL methods are data hungry and repeating this data inefficient process for every new problem makes it difficult to apply online RL to real world robotics problems. What if instead of repeating the data collection and learning process from scratch every time, we were able to reuse data across multiple problems or experiments? By doing so, we could greatly reduce the burden of data collection with every new problem that is encountered.
Python Data Science with Pandas: Master 12 Advanced Projects
Online Courses Udemy - Python Data Science with Pandas: Master 12 Advanced Projects, Work with Pandas, SQL Databases, JSON, Web APIs & more to master your real-world Machine Learning & Finance Projects Bestseller Created by Alexander Hagmann English [Auto] Students also bought Machine Learning and AI: Support Vector Machines in Python Unsupervised Machine Learning Hidden Markov Models in Python Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning in Python Advanced AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python Deep Learning: Advanced Computer Vision (GANs, SSD, More!) Cutting-Edge AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python Preview this course GET COUPON CODE Description Welcome to the first advanced and project-based Pandas Data Science Course! This Course starts where many other courses end: You can write some Pandas code but you are still struggling with real-world Projects because Real-World Data is typically not provided in a single or a few text/excel files - more advanced Data Importing Techniques are required Real-World Data is large, unstructured, nested and unclean - more advanced Data Manipulation and Data Analysis/Visualization Techniques are required many easy-to-use Pandas methods work best with relatively small and clean Datasets - real-world Datasets require more General Code (incorporating other Libraries/Modules) No matter if you need excellent Pandas skills for Data Analysis, Machine Learning or Finance purposes, this is the right Course for you to get your skills to Expert Level! This Course covers the full Data Workflow A-Z: Import (complex and nested) Data from JSON files. Efficiently import and merge Data from many text/CSV files. Clean, handle and flatten nested and stringified Data in DataFrames.
AI Is Making Robots More Fun – IAM Network
The "Curly" curling robots are capturing hearts around the world. A product of Korea University in Seoul and the Berlin Institute of Technology, the deep reinforcement learning powered bots slide stones along ice in a winter sport that dates to the 16th century. As much as their human-expert-bettering accuracy or technology impresses, a big part of the Curly appeal is how we see the little machines in the physical space: the determined manner in which the thrower advances in the arena, smartly raising its head-like cameras to survey the shiny white curling sheet, gently cradling and rotating a rock to begin delivery, releasing deftly at the hog line as a skip watches from the backline, with our hopes.Artificial intelligence (AI) today delivers everything from soup recipes to stock predictions, but most tech works out-of-sight. More visible are the physical robots of various shapes, sizes and functions that embody the latest AI technologies. These robots have generally been helpful, and now they are also becoming a more entertaining and enjoyable part of our lives.
Entropy Regularization for Mean Field Games with Learning
Guo, Xin, Xu, Renyuan, Zariphopoulou, Thaleia
Entropy regularization has been extensively adopted to improve the efficiency, the stability, and the convergence of algorithms in reinforcement learning. This paper analyzes both quantitatively and qualitatively the impact of entropy regularization for Mean Field Game (MFG) with learning in a finite time horizon. Our study provides a theoretical justification that entropy regularization yields time-dependent policies and, furthermore, helps stabilizing and accelerating convergence to the game equilibrium. In addition, this study leads to a policy-gradient algorithm for exploration in MFG. Under this algorithm, agents are able to learn the optimal exploration scheduling, with stable and fast convergence to the game equilibrium.
MARS-Gym: A Gym framework to model, train, and evaluate Recommender Systems for Marketplaces
Santana, Marlesson R. O., Melo, Luckeciano C., Camargo, Fernando H. F., Brandão, Bruno, Soares, Anderson, Oliveira, Renan M., Caetano, Sandor
Recommender Systems are especially challenging for marketplaces since they must maximize user satisfaction while maintaining the healthiness and fairness of such ecosystems. In this context, we observed a lack of resources to design, train, and evaluate agents that learn by interacting within these environments. For this matter, we propose MARS-Gym, an open-source framework to empower researchers and engineers to quickly build and evaluate Reinforcement Learning agents for recommendations in marketplaces. MARS-Gym addresses the whole development pipeline: data processing, model design and optimization, and multi-sided evaluation. We also provide the implementation of a diverse set of baseline agents, with a metrics-driven analysis of them in the Trivago marketplace dataset, to illustrate how to conduct a holistic assessment using the available metrics of recommendation, off-policy estimation, and fairness. With MARS-Gym, we expect to bridge the gap between academic research and production systems, as well as to facilitate the design of new algorithms and applications.
Value-based Bayesian Meta-reinforcement Learning and Traffic Signal Control
Reinforcement learning methods for traffic signal control has gained increasing interests recently and achieved better performances compared with traditional transportation methods. However, reinforcement learning based methods usually requires heavy training data and computational resources which largely limit its application in real-world traffic signal control. This makes meta-learning, which enables data-efficient and fast-adaptation training by leveraging the knowledge of previous learning experiences, catches attentions in traffic signal control. In this paper, we propose a novel value-based Bayesian meta-reinforcement learning framework BM-DQN to robustly speed up the learning process in new scenarios by utilizing well-trained prior knowledge learned from existing scenarios. This framework based on our proposed fast-adaptation variation to Gradient-EM Bayesian Meta-learning and the fast update advantage of DQN, which allows fast adaptation to new scenarios with continual learning ability and robustness to uncertainty. The experiments on 2D navigation and traffic signal control show that our proposed framework adapts more quickly and robustly in new scenarios than previous methods, and specifically, much better continual learning ability in heterogeneous scenarios.
Bridging the gap between Markowitz planning and deep reinforcement learning
Benhamou, Eric, Saltiel, David, Ungari, Sandrine, Mukhopadhyay, Abhishek
While researchers in the asset management industry have mostly focused on techniques based on financial and risk planning techniques like Markowitz efficient frontier, minimum variance, maximum diversification or equal risk parity, in parallel, another community in machine learning has started working on reinforcement learning and more particularly deep reinforcement learning to solve other decision making problems for challenging task like autonomous driving, robot learning, and on a more conceptual side games solving like Go. This paper aims to bridge the gap between these two approaches by showing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques can shed new lights on portfolio allocation thanks to a more general optimization setting that casts portfolio allocation as an optimal control problem that is not just a one-step optimization, but rather a continuous control optimization with a delayed reward. The advantages are numerous: (i) DRL maps directly market conditions to actions by design and hence should adapt to changing environment, (ii) DRL does not rely on any traditional financial risk assumptions like that risk is represented by variance, (iii) DRL can incorporate additional data and be a multi inputs method as opposed to more traditional optimization methods. We present on an experiment some encouraging results using convolution networks.
Multi-document Summarization with Maximal Marginal Relevance-guided Reinforcement Learning
Mao, Yuning, Qu, Yanru, Xie, Yiqing, Ren, Xiang, Han, Jiawei
While neural sequence learning methods have made significant progress in single-document summarization (SDS), they produce unsatisfactory results on multi-document summarization (MDS). We observe two major challenges when adapting SDS advances to MDS: (1) MDS involves larger search space and yet more limited training data, setting obstacles for neural methods to learn adequate representations; (2) MDS needs to resolve higher information redundancy among the source documents, which SDS methods are less effective to handle. To close the gap, we present RL-MMR, Maximal Margin Relevance-guided Reinforcement Learning for MDS, which unifies advanced neural SDS methods and statistical measures used in classical MDS. RL-MMR casts MMR guidance on fewer promising candidates, which restrains the search space and thus leads to better representation learning. Additionally, the explicit redundancy measure in MMR helps the neural representation of the summary to better capture redundancy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RL-MMR achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark MDS datasets. In particular, we show the benefits of incorporating MMR into end-to-end learning when adapting SDS to MDS in terms of both learning effectiveness and efficiency.
Learning Rewards from Linguistic Feedback
Sumers, Theodore R., Ho, Mark K., Hawkins, Robert D., Narasimhan, Karthik, Griffiths, Thomas L.
We explore unconstrained natural language feedback as a learning signal for artificial agents. Humans use rich and varied language to teach, yet most prior work on interactive learning from language assumes a particular form of input (e.g. commands). We propose a general framework which does not make this assumption. We decompose linguistic feedback into two components: a grounding to $\textit{features}$ of a Markov decision process and $\textit{sentiment}$ about those features. We then perform an analogue of inverse reinforcement learning, regressing the teacher's sentiment on the features to infer their latent reward function. To evaluate our approach, we first collect a corpus of teaching behavior in a cooperative task where both teacher and learner are human. We use our framework to implement two artificial learners: a simple "literal" model and a "pragmatic" model with additional inductive biases. We baseline these with a neural network trained end-to-end to predict latent rewards. We then repeat our initial experiment pairing human teachers with our models. We find our "literal" and "pragmatic" models successfully learn from live human feedback and offer statistically-significant performance gains over the end-to-end baseline, with the "pragmatic" model approaching human performance on the task. Inspection reveals the end-to-end network learns representations similar to our models, suggesting they reflect emergent properties of the data. Our work thus provides insight into the information structure of naturalistic linguistic feedback as well as methods to leverage it for reinforcement learning.