This paper studies the problem of learning the correlation structure of a set of intervention functions defined on the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of a causal model. This is useful when we are interested in jointly learning the causal effects of interventions on different subsets of variables in a DAG, which is common in field such as healthcare or operations research. We propose the first multi-task causal Gaussian process (GP) model, which we call DAG-GP, that allows for information sharing across continuous interventions and across experiments on different variables. DAG-GP accommodates different assumptions in terms of data availability and captures the correlation between functions lying in input spaces of different dimensionality via a well-defined integral operator. We give theoretical results detailing when and how the DAG-GP model can be formulated depending on the DAG. We test both the quality of its predictions and its calibrated uncertainties. Compared to single-task models, DAG-GP achieves the best fitting performance in a variety of real and synthetic settings. In addition, it helps to select optimal interventions faster than competing approaches when used within sequential decision making frameworks, like active learning or Bayesian optimization.

Recent advancements in quantum computing have driven the scientific community's quest to solve a certain class of complex problems for which quantum computers would be better suited than traditional supercomputers. To improve the efficiency with which quantum computers can solve these problems, scientists are investigating the use of artificial intelligence approaches. In a new study, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new algorithm based on reinforcement learning to find the optimal parameters for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), which allows a quantum computer to solve certain combinatorial problems such as those that arise in materials design, chemistry and wireless communications. "Combinatorial optimization problems are those for which the solution space gets exponentially larger as you expand the number of decision variables," said Argonne computer scientist Prasanna Balaprakash. "In one traditional example, you can find the shortest route for a salesman who needs to visit a few cities once by enumerating all possible routes, but given a couple thousand cities, the number of possible routes far exceeds the number of stars in the universe; even the fastest supercomputers cannot find the shortest route in a reasonable time."

It was reported that Venture Capital investments into AI related startups made a significant increase in 2018, jumping by 72% compared to 2017, with 466 startups funded from 533 in 2017. PWC moneytree report stated that that seed-stage deal activity in the US among AI-related companies rose to 28% in the fourth-quarter of 2018, compared to 24% in the three months prior, while expansion-stage deal activity jumped to 32%, from 23%. There will be an increasing international rivalry over the global leadership of AI. President Putin of Russia was quoted as saying that "the nation that leads in AI will be the ruler of the world". Billionaire Mark Cuban was reported in CNBC as stating that "the world's first trillionaire would be an AI entrepreneur".

The models of n-ary cross sentence relation extraction based on distant supervision assume that consecutive sentences mentioning n entities describe the relation of these n entities. However, on one hand, this assumption introduces noisy labeled data and harms the models' performance. On the other hand, some non-consecutive sentences also describe one relation and these sentences cannot be labeled under this assumption. In this paper, we relax this strong assumption by a weaker distant supervision assumption to address the second issue and propose a novel sentence distribution estimator model to address the first problem. This estimator selects correctly labeled sentences to alleviate the effect of noisy data is a two-level agent reinforcement learning model. In addition, a novel universal relation extractor with a hybrid approach of attention mechanism and PCNN is proposed such that it can be deployed in any tasks, including consecutive and nonconsecutive sentences. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model can reduce the impact of noisy data and achieve better performance on general n-ary cross sentence relation extraction task compared to baseline models.

Faults are endemic to all systems. Adaptive fault-tolerant control maintains degraded performance when faults occur as opposed to unsafe conditions or catastrophic events. In systems with abrupt faults and strict time constraints, it is imperative for control to adapt quickly to system changes to maintain system operations. We present a meta-reinforcement learning approach that quickly adapts its control policy to changing conditions. The approach builds upon model-agnostic meta learning (MAML). The controller maintains a complement of prior policies learned under system faults. This "library" is evaluated on a system after a new fault to initialize the new policy. This contrasts with MAML, where the controller derives intermediate policies anew, sampled from a distribution of similar systems, to initialize a new policy. Our approach improves sample efficiency of the reinforcement learning process. We evaluate our approach on an aircraft fuel transfer system under abrupt faults.

We propose a general agent population learning system, and on this basis, we propose lineage evolution reinforcement learning algorithm. Lineage evolution reinforcement learning is a kind of derivative algorithm which accords with the general agent population learning system. We take the agents in DQN and its related variants as the basic agents in the population, and add the selection, mutation and crossover modules in the genetic algorithm to the reinforcement learning algorithm. In the process of agent evolution, we refer to the characteristics of natural genetic behavior, add lineage factor to ensure the retention of potential performance of agent, and comprehensively consider the current performance and lineage value when evaluating the performance of agent. Without changing the parameters of the original reinforcement learning algorithm, lineage evolution reinforcement learning can optimize different reinforcement learning algorithms. Our experiments show that the idea of evolution with lineage improves the performance of original reinforcement learning algorithm in some games in Atari 2600.

Many reinforcement learning tasks can benefit from explicit planning based on an internal model of the environment. Previously, such planning components have been incorporated through a neural network that partially aligns with the computational graph of value iteration. Such network have so far been focused on restrictive environments (e.g. grid-worlds), and modelled the planning procedure only indirectly. We relax these constraints, proposing a graph neural network (GNN) that executes the value iteration (VI) algorithm, across arbitrary environment models, with direct supervision on the intermediate steps of VI. The results indicate that GNNs are able to model value iteration accurately, recovering favourable metrics and policies across a variety of out-of-distribution tests. This suggests that GNN executors with strong supervision are a viable component within deep reinforcement learning systems.

In recent years, researchers have been developing machine learning algorithms for an increasingly wide range of purposes. This includes algorithms that can be applied in healthcare settings, for instance helping clinicians to diagnose specific diseases or neuropsychiatric disorders or monitor the health of patients over time. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Massachusetts General Hospital have recently carried out a study investigating the possibility of using deep reinforcement learning to control the levels of unconsciousness of patients who require anesthesia for a medical procedure. Their paper, set to be published in the proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, was voted the best paper presented at the conference. "Our lab has made significant progress in understanding how anesthetic medications affect neural activity and now has a multidisciplinary team studying how to accurately determine anesthetic doses from neural recordings," Gabriel Schamberg, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.

A robot equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) can excel at the Olympic sport of curling -- and even beat top-level human teams. Success requires precision and strategy, but the game is less complex than other real-world applications of robotics. That makes curling a useful test case for AI technologies, which often perform well in simulations but falter in real-world scenarios with changing conditions. Using a method called adaptive deep reinforcement learning, Seong-Whan Lee and his colleagues at Korea University in Seoul created an algorithm that learns through trial and error to adjust a robot's throws to account for changing conditions, such as the ice surface and the positions of stones. The team's robot, nicknamed Curly, needed a few test throws to calibrate itself to the curling rink where it was to compete.

Machine learning can be used to make sense of healthcare data. Probabilistic machine learning models help provide a complete picture of observed data in healthcare. In this review, we examine how probabilistic machine learning can advance healthcare. We consider challenges in the predictive model building pipeline where probabilistic models can be beneficial including calibration and missing data. Beyond predictive models, we also investigate the utility of probabilistic machine learning models in phenotyping, in generative models for clinical use cases, and in reinforcement learning.