A new robot has overcome a fundamental challenge of locomotion by teaching itself how to walk. Researchers from Google developed algorithms that helped the four-legged bot to learn how to walk across a range of surfaces within just hours of practice, annihilating the record times set by its human overlords. Their system uses deep reinforcement learning, a form of AI that teaches through trial and error by providing rewards for certain actions. This technique is typically evaluated in virtual environments. However, building simulations that could replicate the robot walking on various surfaces would be highly complex and time-consuming, so the researchers chose to train their system in the real world.

I hope this is useful for someone. I think the algorithms this research group has been developing are the future of AI, rather than trying to see how we can train 3 Trillion parameter transformers lol!

Some of the agents you'll implement during this course: This course is a series of articles and videos where you'll master the skills and architectures you need, to become a deep reinforcement learning expert. You'll build a strong professional portfolio by implementing awesome agents with Tensorflow that learns to play Space invaders, Doom, Sonic the hedgehog and more!

The popularity of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods in economics have been exponentially increased. DRL through a wide range of capabilities from reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning (DL) for handling sophisticated dynamic business environments offers vast opportunities. DRL is characterized by scalability with the potential to be applied to high-dimensional problems in conjunction with noisy and nonlinear patterns of economic data. In this work, we first consider a brief review of DL, RL, and deep RL methods in diverse applications in economics providing an in-depth insight into the state of the art. Furthermore, the architecture of DRL applied to economic applications is investigated in order to highlight the complexity, robustness, accuracy, performance, computational tasks, risk constraints, and profitability. The survey results indicate that DRL can provide better performance and higher accuracy as compared to the traditional algorithms while facing real economic problems at the presence of risk parameters and the ever-increasing uncertainties.

Predictive power allocation is conceived for power-efficient video streaming over mobile networks using deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to minimize the accumulated energy consumption over a complete video streaming session for a mobile user under the quality of service constraint that avoids video playback interruptions. To handle the continuous state and action spaces, we resort to deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm for solving the formulated problem. In contrast to previous predictive resource policies that first predict future information with historical data and then optimize the policy based on the predicted information, the proposed policy operates in an online and end-to-end manner. By judiciously designing the action and state that only depend on slowly-varying average channel gains, the signaling overhead between the edge server and the base stations can be reduced, and the dynamics of the system can be learned effortlessly. To improve the robustness of streaming and accelerate learning, we further exploit the partially known dynamics of the system by integrating the concepts of safer layer, post-decision state, and virtual experience into the basic DDPG algorithm. Our simulation results show that the proposed polices converge to the optimal policy derived based on perfect prediction of the future large-scale channel gains and outperforms the first-predictthen-optimize policy in the presence of prediction errors. By harnessing the partially known model of the system dynamics, the convergence speed can be dramatically improved. I. INTRODUCTION Mobile video traffic is expected to account for more than 75% of the global mobile data by 2021, and video-on-demand (VoD) services represent the main contributor [2]. This paper was presented in part at IEEE Globecom 2019 [1]. To avoid video stalling for a user experiencing hostile channel conditions, a base station (BS) can increase its transmit power for ensuring that the video segment is downloaded before being played.

In this paper, we propose an autonomous UAV path planning framework using deep reinforcement learning approach. The objective is to employ a self-trained UAV as a flying mobile unit to reach spatially distributed moving or static targets in a given three dimensional urban area. In this approach, a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) with continuous action space is designed to train the UAV to navigate through or over the obstacles to reach its assigned target. A customized reward function is developed to minimize the distance separating the UAV and its destination while penalizing collisions. Numerical simulations investigate the behavior of the UAV in learning the environment and autonomously determining trajectories for different selected scenarios.

The next generation of mobile robots needs to be socially-compliant to be accepted by humans. As simple as this task may seem, defining compliance formally is not trivial. Yet, classical reinforcement learning (RL) relies upon hard-coded reward signals. In this work, we go beyond this approach and provide the agent with intrinsic motivation using empowerment. Empowerment maximizes the influence of an agent on its near future and has been shown to be a good model for biological behaviors. It also has been used for artificial agents to learn complicated and generalized actions. Self-empowerment maximizes the influence of an agent on its future. On the contrary, our robot strives for the empowerment of people in its environment, so they are not disturbed by the robot when pursuing their goals. We show that our robot has a positive influence on humans, as it minimizes the travel time and distance of humans while moving efficiently to its own goal. The method can be used in any multi-agent system that requires a robot to solve a particular task involving humans interactions.

The book AI Crash Course by Hadelin de Ponteves contains a toolkit of four different AI models: Thompson Sampling, Q-Learning, Deep Q-Learning and Deep Convolutional Q-learning. It teaches the theory of these AI models and provides coding examples for solving industry cases based on these models. InfoQ readers can find an excerpt of AI Crash Course on the publisher's website. InfoQ interviewed Hadelin de Ponteves about using different AI models and how to develop AI skills. InfoQ: Why did you write this book?

In this paper, we propose a general theoretical method for analyzing the risk bound in the presence of adversaries. Specifically, we try to fit the adversarial learning problem into the minimax framework. We first show that the original adversarial learning problem can be transformed into a minimax statistical learning problem by introducing a transport map between distributions. Then, we prove a new risk bound for this minimax problem in terms of covering numbers under a weak version of Lipschitz condition. Our method can be applied to multi-class classification and popular loss functions including the hinge loss and ramp loss.

This paper investigates the idea of encoding object-centered representations in the design of the reward function and policy architectures of a language-guided reinforcement learning agent. This is done using a combination of object-wise permutation invariant networks inspired from Deep Sets and gated-attention mechanisms. In a 2D procedurally-generated world where agents targeting goals in natural language navigate and interact with objects, we show that these architectures demonstrate strong generalization capacities to out-of-distribution goals. We study the generalization to varying numbers of objects at test time and further extend the object-centered architectures to goals involving relational reasoning.