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 Reinforcement Learning


Privileged Information Dropout in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Using privileged information during training can improve the sample efficiency and performance of machine learning systems. This paradigm has been applied to reinforcement learning (RL), primarily in the form of distillation or auxiliary tasks, and less commonly in the form of augmenting the inputs of agents. In this work, we investigate Privileged Information Dropout (PI-Dropout) for achieving the latter which can be applied equally to value-based and policy-based RL algorithms. Within a simple partially-observed environment, we demonstrate that PI-Dropout outperforms alternatives for leveraging privileged information, including distillation and auxiliary tasks, and can successfully utilise different types of privileged information. Finally, we analyse its effect on the learned representations.


Safe Learning for Near Optimal Scheduling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we investigate the combination of synthesis techniques and learning techniques to obtain safe and near optimal schedulers for a preemptible task scheduling problem. We study both model-based learning techniques with PAC guarantees and model-free learning techniques based on shielded deep Q-learning. The new learning algorithms have been implemented to conduct experimental evaluations.


Experience Augmentation: Boosting and Accelerating Off-Policy Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Exploration of the high-dimensional state action space is one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in multi-agent domain. We present a novel technique called Experience Augmentation, which enables a time-efficient and boosted learning based on a fast, fair and thorough exploration to the environment. It can be combined with arbitrary off-policy MARL algorithms and is applicable to either homogeneous or heterogeneous environments. We demonstrate our approach by combining it with MADDPG and verifing the performance in two homogeneous and one heterogeneous environments. In the best performing scenario, the MADDPG with experience augmentation reaches to the convergence reward of vanilla MADDPG with 1/4 realistic time, and its convergence beats the original model by a significant margin. Our ablation studies show that experience augmentation is a crucial ingredient which accelerates the training process and boosts the convergence.


A Survey of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Dynamically Varying Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them difficult to solve with the basic assumptions underlying classical RL algorithms. RL agents in these applications often need to react and adapt to changing operating conditions. A significant part of research on single-agent RL techniques focuses on developing algorithms when the underlying assumption of stationary environment model is relaxed. This paper provides a survey of RL methods developed for handling dynamically varying environment models. The goal of methods not limited by the stationarity assumption is to help autonomous agents adapt to varying operating conditions. This is possible either by minimizing the rewards lost during learning by RL agent or by finding a suitable policy for the RL agent which leads to efficient operation of the underlying system. A representative collection of these algorithms is discussed in detail in this work along with their categorization and their relative merits and demerits. Additionally we also review works which are tailored to application domains. Finally, we discuss future enhancements for this field.


Batch-Augmented Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Traffic Signal Optimization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The goal of this work is to provide a viable solution based on reinforcement learning for traffic signal control problems. Although the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches have yielded great success in a variety of domains, directly applying it to alleviate traffic congestion can be challenging, considering the requirement of high sample efficiency and how training data is gathered. In this work, we address several challenges that we encountered when we attempted to mitigate serious traffic congestion occurring in a metropolitan area. Specifically, we are required to provide a solution that is able to (1) handle the traffic signal control when certain surveillance cameras that retrieve information for reinforcement learning are down, (2) learn from batch data without a traffic simulator, and (3) make control decisions without shared information across intersections. We present a two-stage framework to deal with the above-mentioned situations. The framework can be decomposed into an Evolution Strategies approach that gives a fixed-time traffic signal control schedule and a multi-agent off-policy reinforcement learning that is capable of learning from batch data with the aid of three proposed components, bounded action, batch augmentation, and surrogate reward clipping. Our experiments show that the proposed framework reduces traffic congestion by 36% in terms of waiting time compared with the currently used fixed-time traffic signal plan. Furthermore, the framework requires only 600 queries to a simulator to achieve the result.


Learning To Navigate The Synthetically Accessible Chemical Space Using Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Over the last decade, there has been significant progress in the field of machine learning for de novo drug design, particularly in deep generative models. However, current generative approaches exhibit a significant challenge as they do not ensure that the proposed molecular structures can be feasibly synthesized nor do they provide the synthesis routes of the proposed small molecules, thereby seriously limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we propose a novel forward synthesis framework powered by reinforcement learning (RL) for de novo drug design, Policy Gradient for Forward Synthesis (PGFS), that addresses this challenge by embedding the concept of synthetic accessibility directly into the de novo drug design system. In this setup, the agent learns to navigate through the immense synthetically accessible chemical space by subjecting commercially available small molecule building blocks to valid chemical reactions at every time step of the iterative virtual multi-step synthesis process. The proposed environment for drug discovery provides a highly challenging test-bed for RL algorithms owing to the large state space and high-dimensional continuous action space with hierarchical actions. PGFS achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating structures with high QED and penalized clogP. Moreover, we validate PGFS in an in-silico proof-of-concept associated with three HIV targets. Finally, we describe how the end-to-end training conceptualized in this study represents an important paradigm in radically expanding the synthesizable chemical space and automating the drug discovery process.


Artificial Intelligence for Business

#artificialintelligence

Online Courses Udemy Artificial Intelligence for Business, Solve Real World Business Problems with AI Solutions Created by Hadelin de Ponteves, Kirill Eremenko, SuperDataScience Team English [Auto-generated], French [Auto-generated], 5 more Students also bought Data Science: Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python Deep Learning: Advanced Computer Vision (GANs, SSD, More!) Tensorflow 2.0: Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Practical: 6 Real-World Applications Artificial Intelligence: Reinforcement Learning in Python Preview this course GET COUPON CODE Description Structure of the course: Part 1 - Optimizing Business Processes Case Study: Optimizing the Flows in an E-Commerce Warehouse AI Solution: Q-Learning Part 2 - Minimizing Costs Case Study: Minimizing the Costs in Energy Consumption of a Data Center AI Solution: Deep Q-Learning Part 3 - Maximizing Revenues Case Study: Maximizing Revenue of an Online Retail Business AI Solution: Thompson Sampling Real World Business Applications: With Artificial Intelligence, you can do three main things for any business: Optimize Business Processes Minimize Costs Maximize Revenues We will show you exactly how to succeed these applications, through Real World Business case studies. And for each of these applications we will build a separate AI to solve the challenge. In Part 1 - Optimizing Processes, we will build an AI that will optimize the flows in an E-Commerce warehouse. In Part 2 - Minimizing Costs, we will build a more advanced AI that will minimize the costs in energy consumption of a data center by more than 50%! Just as Google did last year thanks to DeepMind.


Dampen the Stop-and-Go Traffic with Connected and Automated Vehicles -- A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Stop-and-go traffic poses many challenges to tranportation system, but its formation and mechanism are still under exploration.however, it has been proved that by introducing Connected Automated Vehicles(CAVs) with carefully designed controllers one could dampen the stop-and-go waves in the vehicle fleet. Instead of using analytical model, this study adopts reinforcement learning to control the behavior of CAV and put a single CAV at the 2nd position of a vehicle fleet with the purpose to dampen the speed oscillation from the fleet leader and help following human drivers adopt more smooth driving behavior. The result show that our controller could decrease the spped oscillation of the CAV by 54% and 8%-28% for those following human-driven vehicles. Significant fuel consumption savings are also observed. Additionally, the result suggest that CAVs may act as a traffic stabilizer if they choose to behave slightly altruistically.


AI and Machine Learning for Healthcare - KDnuggets

#artificialintelligence

The 21st century is only two decades old and it is certain that one of the biggest transformative technologies and enablers for human society of this century is going to be Artificial intelligence (AI). It is a well-established idea that AI and associated services and platforms are set to transform global productivity, working patterns, and lifestyles and create enormous wealth. For example, McKinsey sees it delivering global economic activity of around $13 trillion by 2030. In the short-term, research firm Gartner expects the global AI-based economic activity to increase from about $1.2 trillion in 2018 to about $3.9 Trillion by 2022. It is no secret that this transformation is being, to a large extent, fueled by the powerful Machine Learning (ML) tools and techniques such as Deep Convolutional Networks, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), Gradient-boosted-tree models (GBM), Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), etc. However, traditional business and technology sectors are not the only fields being impacted by AI.


Discovering Hierarchies for Reinforcement Learning Using Data Mining

AAAI Conferences

Reinforcement Learning has the limitation that problems become too large very quickly. Dividing the problem into a hierarchy of subtasks allows for a strategy of divide and conquer, which is what makes Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms often more efficient at finding solutions quicker than more naive approaches. One of the biggest challenges with HRL is the construction of a hierarchy to be used by the algorithm. Hierarchies are often designed by a person using their own knowledge of the problem. We propose method for automatically discovering task hierarchies based on a data mining technique, Association Rule Learning (ARL). These hierarchies can then be applied to Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) problems using the options technique