Summarizing video content is an important task in many applications. This task can be defined as the computation of the ordered list of actions present in a video. Such a list could be extracted using action detection algorithms. However, it is not necessary to determine the temporal boundaries of actions to know their existence. Moreover, localizing precise boundaries usually requires dense video analysis to be effective. In this work, we propose to directly compute this ordered list by sparsely browsing the video and selecting one frame per action instance, task known as action spotting in literature. To do this, we propose ActionSpotter, a spotting algorithm that takes advantage of Deep Reinforcement Learning to efficiently spot actions while adapting its video browsing speed, without additional supervision. Experiments performed on datasets THUMOS14 and ActivityNet show that our framework outperforms state of the art detection methods. In particular, the spotting mean Average Precision on THUMOS14 is significantly improved from 59.7% to 65.6% while skipping 23% of video.

Autonomous vehicles must be comprehensively evaluated before deployed in cities and highways. Current evaluation procedures lack the abilities of weakness-aiming and evolving, thus they could hardly generate adversarial environments for autonomous vehicles, leading to insufficient challenges. To overcome the shortage of static evaluation methods, this paper proposes a novel method to generate adversarial environments with deep reinforcement learning, and to cluster them with a nonparametric Bayesian method. As a representative task of autonomous driving, lane-change is used to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. First, two lane-change models are separately developed by a rule-based method and a learning-based method, waiting for evaluation and comparison. Next, adversarial environments are generated by training surrounding interactive vehicles with deep reinforcement learning for local optimal ensembles. Then, a nonparametric Bayesian approach is utilized to cluster the adversarial policies of the interactive vehicles. Finally, the adversarial environment patterns are illustrated and the performances of two lane-change models are evaluated and compared. The simulation results indicate that both models perform significantly worse in adversarial environments than in naturalistic environments, with plenty of weaknesses successfully extracted in a few tests.

We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe outcomes for the individuals within a batch at the batch's end. Compared to both standard online contextual bandits learning or offline policy learning in contexutal bandits, this sequential batch learning problem provides a finer-grained formulation of many personalized sequential decision making problems in practical applications, including medical treatment in clinical trials, product recommendation in e-commerce and adaptive experiment design in crowdsourcing. We study two settings of the problem: one where the contexts are arbitrarily generated and the other where the contexts are \textit{iid} drawn from some distribution. In each setting, we establish a regret lower bound and provide an algorithm, whose regret upper bound nearly matches the lower bound. As an important insight revealed therefrom, in the former setting, we show that the number of batches required to achieve the fully online performance is polynomial in the time horizon, while for the latter setting, a pure-exploitation algorithm with a judicious batch partition scheme achieves the fully online performance even when the number of batches is less than logarithmic in the time horizon. Together, our results provide a near-complete characterization of sequential decision making in linear contextual bandits when batch constraints are present.

The evaluation of constitutive models, especially for high-risk and high-regret engineering applications, requires efficient and rigorous third-party calibration, validation and falsification. While there are numerous efforts to develop paradigms and standard procedures to validate models, difficulties may arise due to the sequential, manual and often biased nature of the commonly adopted calibration and validation processes, thus slowing down data collections, hampering the progress towards discovering new physics, increasing expenses and possibly leading to misinterpretations of the credibility and application ranges of proposed models. This work attempts to introduce concepts from game theory and machine learning techniques to overcome many of these existing difficulties. We introduce an automated meta-modeling game where two competing AI agents systematically generate experimental data to calibrate a given constitutive model and to explore its weakness, in order to improve experiment design and model robustness through competition. The two agents automatically search for the Nash equilibrium of the meta-modeling game in an adversarial reinforcement learning framework without human intervention. By capturing all possible design options of the laboratory experiments into a single decision tree, we recast the design of experiments as a game of combinatorial moves that can be resolved through deep reinforcement learning by the two competing players. Our adversarial framework emulates idealized scientific collaborations and competitions among researchers to achieve a better understanding of the application range of the learned material laws and prevent misinterpretations caused by conventional AI-based third-party validation.

We report a previously unidentified issue with model-free, value-based approaches to multiobjective reinforcement learning in the context of environments with stochastic state transitions. An example multiobjective Markov Decision Process (MOMDP) is used to demonstrate that under such conditions these approaches may be unable to discover the policy which maximises the Scalarised Expected Return, and in fact may converge to a Pareto-dominated solution. We discuss several alternative methods which may be more suitable for maximising SER in MOMDPs with stochastic transitions.

We study cost-effective communication strategies that can be used to improve the performance of distributed learning systems in resource-constrained environments. For distributed learning in sequential decision making, we propose a new cost-effective partial communication protocol. We illustrate that with this protocol the group obtains the same order of performance that it obtains with full communication. Moreover, we prove that under the proposed partial communication protocol the communication cost is $O(\log T)$, where $T$ is the time horizon of the decision-making process. This improves significantly on protocols with full communication, which incur a communication cost that is $O(T)$. We validate our theoretical results using numerical simulations.

The Markov decision process is the mathematical formalization underlying the modern field of reinforcement learning when transition and reward functions are unknown. We derive a pseudo-Boolean cost function that is equivalent to a K-spin Hamiltonian representation of the discrete, finite, discounted Markov decision process with infinite horizon. This K-spin Hamiltonian furnishes a starting point from which to solve for an optimal policy using heuristic quantum algorithms such as adiabatic quantum annealing and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm on near-term quantum hardware. In proving that the variational minimization of our Hamiltonian is equivalent to the Bellman optimality condition we establish an interesting analogy with classical field theory. Along with proof-of-concept calculations to corroborate our formulation by simulated and quantum annealing against classical Q-Learning, we analyze the scaling of physical resources required to solve our Hamiltonian on quantum hardware.

The large integration of variable energy resources is expected to shift a large part of the energy exchanges closer to real-time, where more accurate forecasts are available. In this context, the short-term electricity markets and in particular the intraday market are considered a suitable trading floor for these exchanges to occur. A key component for the successful renewable energy sources integration is the usage of energy storage. In this paper, we propose a novel modelling framework for the strategic participation of energy storage in the European continuous intraday market where exchanges occur through a centralized order book. The goal of the storage device operator is the maximization of the profits received over the entire trading horizon, while taking into account the operational constraints of the unit. The sequential decision-making problem of trading in the intraday market is modelled as a Markov Decision Process. An asynchronous distributed version of the fitted Q iteration algorithm is chosen for solving this problem due to its sample efficiency. The large and variable number of the existing orders in the order book motivates the use of high-level actions and an alternative state representation. Historical data are used for the generation of a large number of artificial trajectories in order to address exploration issues during the learning process. The resulting policy is back-tested and compared against a benchmark strategy that is the current industrial standard. Results indicate that the agent converges to a policy that achieves in average higher total revenues than the benchmark strategy.

We consider the exploration-exploitation dilemma in finite-horizon reinforcement learning problems whose state-action space is endowed with a metric. We introduce Kernel-UCBVI, a model-based optimistic algorithm that leverages the smoothness of the MDP and a non-parametric kernel estimator of the rewards and transitions to efficiently balance exploration and exploitation. Unlike existing approaches with regret guarantees, it does not use any kind of partitioning of the state-action space. For problems with $K$ episodes and horizon $H$, we provide a regret bound of $O\left( H^3 K^{\max\left(\frac{1}{2}, \frac{2d}{2d+1}\right)}\right)$, where $d$ is the covering dimension of the joint state-action space. We empirically validate Kernel-UCBVI on discrete and continuous MDPs.

Easy tips to train your Reinforcement Learning AI with Unity3D using the ML-Agents Framework. My name is Sebastian Schuchmann, AI enthusiast from Germany and we are going to cover simple, beginner-friendly ways to improve your Machine Learning process. The Algorithm used is called PPO and was developed by OpenAI (founded by Elon Musk). After watching this video you will hopefully be able to train an Artificial Intelligence to crack your favorite game. I am very curious about what you guys will create!