In the present paper, we propose a decoder-free extension of Dreamer, a leading model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) method from pixels. Dreamer is a sample- and cost-efficient solution to robot learning, as it is used to train latent state-space models based on a variational autoencoder and to conduct policy optimization by latent trajectory imagination. However, this autoencoding based approach often causes object vanishing, in which the autoencoder fails to perceives key objects for solving control tasks, and thus significantly limiting Dreamer's potential. This work aims to relieve this Dreamer's bottleneck and enhance its performance by means of removing the decoder. For this purpose, we firstly derive a likelihood-free and InfoMax objective of contrastive learning from the evidence lower bound of Dreamer. Secondly, we incorporate two components, (i) independent linear dynamics and (ii) the random crop data augmentation, to the learning scheme so as to improve the training performance. In comparison to Dreamer and other recent model-free reinforcement learning methods, our newly devised Dreamer with InfoMax and without generative decoder (Dreaming) achieves the best scores on 5 difficult simulated robotics tasks, in which Dreamer suffers from object vanishing.

Three main deep learning approaches are supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. The first two consume huge amounts of data (like images or articles), look for patterns in the data, and use those patterns to inform actions (like identifying an image of a cat). To us, this is a pretty alien way to learn about the world. Not only would it be mind-numbingly dull to review millions of cat images, it'd take us years or more to do what these programs do in hours or days. And of course, we can learn what a cat looks like from just a few examples.

Simply put, for the last 200 years, advisers have worked on the principle of information asymmetry, where they have better information than their clients. Today, we are at the point where machine intelligence is gaining information asymmetry over advisers, and that's only going to get more acute and asymmetrical as time goes on. The only possible hope for human advisers is that they co-opt machine intelligence into their process.

First announced in November 2018, AWS DeepRacer is a fun and interesting way to get rolling with reinforcement learning (RL), literally, with the fully …

We propose a novel solution to challenging sparse-reward, continuous control problems that require hierarchical planning at multiple levels of abstraction. Our solution, dubbed AlphaNPI-X, involves three separate stages of learning. First, we use off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms with experience replay to learn a set of atomic goal-conditioned policies, which can be easily repurposed for many tasks. Second, we learn self-models describing the effect of the atomic policies on the environment. Third, the self-models are harnessed to learn recursive compositional programs with multiple levels of abstraction. The key insight is that the self-models enable planning by imagination, obviating the need for interaction with the world when learning higher-level compositional programs. To accomplish the third stage of learning, we extend the AlphaNPI algorithm, which applies AlphaZero to learn recursive neural programmer-interpreters. We empirically show that AlphaNPI-X can effectively learn to tackle challenging sparse manipulation tasks, such as stacking multiple blocks, where powerful model-free baselines fail.

Bayesian strategies for contextual bandits have proved promising in single-state reinforcement learning tasks by modeling uncertainty using context information from the environment. In this paper, we propose Greedy Bandits with Sampled Context (GB-SC), a method for contextual multi-armed bandits to develop the prior from the context information using Thompson Sampling, and arm selection using an epsilon-greedy policy. The framework GB-SC allows for evaluation of context-reward dependency, as well as providing robustness for partially observable context vectors by leveraging the prior developed. Our experimental results show competitive performance on the Mushroom environment in terms of expected regret and expected cumulative regret, as well as insights on how each context subset affects decision-making.

The combination of deep reinforcement learning and search at both training and test time is a powerful paradigm that has led to a number of a successes in single-agent settings and perfect-information games, best exemplified by the success of AlphaZero. However, algorithms of this form have been unable to cope with imperfect-information games. This paper presents ReBeL, a general framework for self-play reinforcement learning and search for imperfect-information games. In the simpler setting of perfect-information games, ReBeL reduces to an algorithm similar to AlphaZero. Results show ReBeL leads to low exploitability in benchmark imperfect-information games and achieves superhuman performance in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em poker, while using far less domain knowledge than any prior poker AI. We also prove that ReBeL converges to a Nash equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games in tabular settings.

A fundamental question in offline reinforcement learning (RL) is how to estimate the value of some target evaluation policy, defined as the long-run average reward obtained by following the policy, using data logged by running a different behavior policy. This question, known as off-policy evaluation (OPE), often arises in applications such as healthcare, education, or robotics, where experimenting with running the target policy can be expensive or even impossible, but we have data logged following business as usual or current standards of care. A central concern using such passively observed data is that observed actions, rewards, and transitions may be confounded by unobserved variables, which can bias standard OPE methods that assume no unobserved confounders, or equivalently that a standard Markov decision process (MDP) model holds with fully observed state. Consider for example evaluating a new smart-phone app to help people living with type-1 diabetes time their insulin injections by monitoring their blood glucose level using some wearable device. Rather than risking giving bad advice that may harm individuals, we may consider first evaluating our injection-timing policy using existing longitudinal observations of individuals' blood glucose levels over time and the timing of insulin injections.

Cloud computing (CC) is a centralized computing paradigm that accumulates resources centrally and provides these resources to users through Internet. Although CC holds a large number of resources, it may not be acceptable by real-time mobile applications, as it is usually far away from users geographically. On the other hand, edge computing (EC), which distributes resources to the network edge, enjoys increasing popularity in the applications with low-latency and high-reliability requirements. EC provides resources in a decentralized manner, which can respond to users' requirements faster than the normal CC, but with limited computing capacities. As both CC and EC are resource-sensitive, several big issues arise, such as how to conduct job scheduling, resource allocation, and task offloading, which significantly influence the performance of the whole system. To tackle these issues, many optimization problems have been formulated. These optimization problems usually have complex properties, such as non-convexity and NP-hardness, which may not be addressed by the traditional convex optimization-based solutions. Computational intelligence (CI), consisting of a set of nature-inspired computational approaches, recently exhibits great potential in addressing these optimization problems in CC and EC. This paper provides an overview of research problems in CC and EC and recent progresses in addressing them with the help of CI techniques. Informative discussions and future research trends are also presented, with the aim of offering insights to the readers and motivating new research directions.

Humans integrate multiple sensory modalities (e.g. visual and audio) to build a causal understanding of the physical world. In this work, we propose a novel type of intrinsic motivation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that encourages the agent to understand the causal effect of its actions through auditory event prediction. First, we allow the agent to collect a small amount of acoustic data and use K-means to discover underlying auditory event clusters. We then train a neural network to predict the auditory events and use the prediction errors as intrinsic rewards to guide RL exploration. Experimental results on Atari games show that our new intrinsic motivation significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines. We further visualize our noisy agents' behavior in a physics environment and demonstrate that our newly designed intrinsic reward leads to the emergence of physical interaction behaviors (e.g. contact with objects).