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 Reinforcement Learning


IntelligentPooling: Practical Thompson Sampling for mHealth

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In mobile health (mHealth) smart devices deliver behavioral treatments repeatedly over time to a user with the goal of helping the user adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. Reinforcement learning appears ideal for learning how to optimally make these sequential treatment decisions. However, significant challenges must be overcome before reinforcement learning can be effectively deployed in a mobile healthcare setting. In this work we are concerned with the following challenges: 1) individuals who are in the same context can exhibit differential response to treatments 2) only a limited amount of data is available for learning on any one individual, and 3) non-stationary responses to treatment. To address these challenges we generalize Thompson-Sampling bandit algorithms to develop IntelligentPooling. IntelligentPooling learns personalized treatment policies thus addressing challenge one. To address the second challenge, IntelligentPooling updates each user's degree of personalization while making use of available data on other users to speed up learning. Lastly, IntelligentPooling allows responsivity to vary as a function of a user's time since beginning treatment, thus addressing challenge three. We show that IntelligentPooling achieves an average of 26% lower regret than state-of-the-art. We demonstrate the promise of this approach and its ability to learn from even a small group of users in a live clinical trial.


Deep Reinforcement Learning using Cyclical Learning Rates

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods often rely on the meticulous tuning of hyperparameters to successfully resolve problems. One of the most influential parameters in optimization procedures based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the learning rate. We investigate cyclical learning and propose a method for defining a general cyclical learning rate for various DRL problems. In this paper we present a method for cyclical learning applied to complex DRL problems. Our experiments show that, utilizing cyclical learning achieves similar or even better results than highly tuned fixed learning rates. This paper presents the first application of cyclical learning rates in DRL settings and is a step towards overcoming manual hyperparameter tuning.


Never Stop Learning: The Effectiveness of Fine-Tuning in Robotic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

One of the great promises of robot learning systems is that they will be able to learn from their mistakes and continuously adapt to ever-changing environments. Despite this potential, most of the robot learning systems today are deployed as a fixed policy and they are not being adapted after their deployment. Can we efficiently adapt previously learned behaviors to new environments, objects and percepts in the real world? In this paper, we present a method and empirical evidence towards a robot learning framework that facilitates continuous adaption. In particular, we demonstrate how to adapt vision-based robotic manipulation policies to new variations by fine-tuning via off-policy reinforcement learning, including changes in background, object shape and appearance, lighting conditions, and robot morphology. Further, this adaptation uses less than 0.2% of the data necessary to learn the task from scratch. We find that our approach of adapting pre-trained policies leads to substantial performance gains over the course of fine-tuning, and that pre-training via RL is essential: training from scratch or adapting from supervised ImageNet features are both unsuccessful with such small amounts of data. We also find that these positive results hold in a limited continual learning setting, in which we repeatedly fine-tune a single lineage of policies using data from a succession of new tasks. Our empirical conclusions are consistently supported by experiments on simulated manipulation tasks, and by 52 unique fine-tuning experiments on a real robotic grasping system pre-trained on 580,000 grasps.


Quantity vs. Quality: On Hyperparameter Optimization for Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement learning algorithms can show strong variation in performance between training runs with different random seeds. In this paper we explore how this affects hyperparameter optimization when the goal is to find hyperparameter settings that perform well across random seeds. In particular, we benchmark whether it is better to explore a large quantity of hyperparameter settings via pruning of bad performers, or if it is better to aim for quality of collected results by using repetitions. For this we consider the Successive Halving, Random Search, and Bayesian Optimization algorithms, the latter two with and without repetitions. We apply these to tuning the PPO2 algorithm on the Cartpole balancing task and the Inverted Pendulum Swing-up task. We demonstrate that pruning may negatively affect the optimization and that repeated sampling does not help in finding hyperparameter settings that perform better across random seeds. From our experiments we conclude that Bayesian optimization with a noise robust acquisition function is the best choice for hyperparameter optimization in reinforcement learning tasks.


Moody Learners -- Explaining Competitive Behaviour of Reinforcement Learning Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Designing the decision-making processes of artificial agents that are involved in competitive interactions is a challenging task. In a competitive scenario, the agent does not only have a dynamic environment but also is directly affected by the opponents' actions. Observing the Q-values of the agent is usually a way of explaining its behavior, however, do not show the temporal-relation between the selected actions. We address this problem by proposing the \emph{Moody framework}. We evaluate our model by performing a series of experiments using the competitive multiplayer Chef's Hat card game and discuss how our model allows the agents' to obtain a holistic representation of the competitive dynamics within the game.


Momentum Q-learning with Finite-Sample Convergence Guarantee

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Existing studies indicate that momentum ideas in conventional optimization can be used to improve the performance of Q-learning algorithms. However, the finite-sample analysis for momentum-based Q-learning algorithms is only available for the tabular case without function approximations. This paper analyzes a class of momentum-based Q-learning algorithms with finite-sample guarantee. Specifically, we propose the MomentumQ algorithm, which integrates the Nesterov's and Polyak's momentum schemes, and generalizes the existing momentum-based Q-learning algorithms. For the infinite state-action space case, we establish the convergence guarantee for MomentumQ with linear function approximations and Markovian sampling. In particular, we characterize the finite-sample convergence rate which is provably faster than the vanilla Q-learning. This is the first finite-sample analysis for momentum-based Q-learning algorithms with function approximations. For the tabular case under synchronous sampling, we also obtain a finite-sample convergence rate that is slightly better than the SpeedyQ \citep{azar2011speedy} when choosing a special family of step sizes. Finally, we demonstrate through various experiments that the proposed MomentumQ outperforms other momentum-based Q-learning algorithms.


PixL2R: Guiding Reinforcement Learning Using Natural Language by Mapping Pixels to Rewards

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior approaches have used natural language to guide the agent's exploration. However, these approaches typically operate on structured representations of the environment, and/or assume some structure in the natural language commands. In this work, we propose a model that directly maps pixels to rewards, given a free-form natural language description of the task, which can then be used for policy learning. Our experiments on the Meta-World robot manipulation domain show that language-based rewards significantly improves the sample efficiency of policy learning, both in sparse and dense reward settings.


Data Science 2020 : Complete Data Science & Machine Learning

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Online Courses Udemy Data Science 2020: Complete Data Science & Machine Learning, Machine Learning A-Z, Data Science, Python for Machine Learning, Math for Machine Learning, Statistics for Data Science Created by Jitesh Khurkhuriya Jitesh's Data Science & Machine Learning A-Z Team Students also bought Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning in Python Advanced AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python Unsupervised Machine Learning Hidden Markov Models in Python Artificial Intelligence: Reinforcement Learning in Python Ensemble Machine Learning in Python: Random Forest, AdaBoost Preview this course GET COUPON CODE Description Data Science and Machine Learning are the hottest skills in demand but challenging to learn. Did you wish that there was one course for Data Science and Machine Learning that covers everything from Math for Machine Learning, Advance Statistics for Data Science, Data Processing, Machine Learning A-Z, Deep learning and more? Well, you have come to the right place. This Data Science and Machine Learning course has 250 lectures, more than 25 hours of content, 11 projects including one Kaggle competition with top 1 percentile score, code templates and various quizzes. Today Data Science and Machine Learning is used in almost all the industries, including automobile, banking, healthcare, media, telecom and others.


Cutting-Edge AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python

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Online Courses Udemy - Cutting-Edge AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python, Apply deep learning to artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning using evolution strategies, A2C, and DDPG Highest Rated Created by Lazy Programmer Inc. English [Auto] Students also bought Machine Learning and AI: Support Vector Machines in Python Unsupervised Machine Learning Hidden Markov Models in Python Unsupervised Deep Learning in Python Advanced AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python Data Science: Deep Learning in Python Deep Learning: Advanced Computer Vision (GANs, SSD, More!) Preview this course GET COUPON CODE Description Welcome to Cutting-Edge AI! This is technically Deep Learning in Python part 11 of my deep learning series, and my 3rd reinforcement learning course. Deep Reinforcement Learning is actually the combination of 2 topics: Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning (Neural Networks). While both of these have been around for quite some time, it's only been recently that Deep Learning has really taken off, and along with it, Reinforcement Learning. The maturation of deep learning has propelled advances in reinforcement learning, which has been around since the 1980s, although some aspects of it, such as the Bellman equation, have been for much longer.


DeepMind's Newest AI Programs Itself to Make All the Right Decisions

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Now, Alphabet's DeepMind is taking this automation further by developing deep learning algorithms that can handle programming tasks which have been, to date, the sole domain of the world's top computer scientists (and take them years to write). In a paper recently published on the pre-print server arXiv, the DeepMind team described a new deep reinforcement learning algorithm that was able to discover its own value function--a critical programming rule in deep reinforcement learning--from scratch. Surprisingly, the algorithm was also effective beyond the simple environments it trained in, going on to play Atari games--a different, more complicated task, achieving superhuman levels of play in 14 games. DeepMind says the approach could accelerate the development of reinforcement learning algorithms and even lead to a shift in focus, where instead of spending years writing the algorithms themselves, researchers work to perfect the environments in which they train. Move by move, game by game, an algorithm combines experience and value function to learn which actions bring greater rewards and improves its play, until eventually, engineers may shift from manually developing the algorithms themselves to building the environments where they learn.