Within Reinforcement Learning, there is a fledgling approach to conceptualizing the environment in terms of predictions. Central to this predictive approach is the assertion that it is possible to construct ontologies in terms of predictions about sensation, behaviour, and time---to categorize the world into entities which express all aspects of the world using only predictions. This construction of ontologies is integral to predictive approaches to machine knowledge where objects are described exclusively in terms of how they are perceived. In this paper, we ground the Pericean model of semiotics in terms of Reinforcement Learning Methods, describing Peirce's Three Categories in the notation of General Value Functions. Using the Peircean model of semiotics, we demonstrate that predictions alone are insufficient to construct an ontology; however, we identify predictions as being integral to the meaning-making process. Moreover, we discuss how predictive knowledge provides a particularly stable foundation for semiosis\textemdash the process of making meaning\textemdash and suggest a possible avenue of research to design algorithmic methods which construct semantics and meaning using predictions.

TAMER has proven to be a powerful interactive reinforcement learning method for allowing ordinary people to teach and personalize autonomous agents' behavior by providing evaluative feedback. However, a TAMER agent planning with UCT---a Monte Carlo Tree Search strategy, can only update states along its path and might induce high learning cost especially for a physical robot. In this paper, we propose to drive the agent's exploration along the optimal path and reduce the learning cost by initializing the agent's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning from demonstration. We test our proposed method in the RL benchmark domain---Grid World---with different discounts on human reward. Our results show that learning from demonstration can allow a TAMER agent to learn a roughly optimal policy up to the deepest search and encourage the agent to explore along the optimal path. In addition, we find that learning from demonstration can improve the learning efficiency by reducing total feedback, the number of incorrect actions and increasing the ratio of correct actions to obtain an optimal policy, allowing a TAMER agent to converge faster.

Abstract: We show how to teach machines to paint like human painters, who can use a few strokes to create fantastic paintings. By combining the neural renderer and model-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), our agent can decompose texture-rich images into strokes and make long-term plans. For each stroke, the agent directly determines the position and color of the stroke. Excellent visual effect can be achieved using hundreds of strokes. The training process does not require experience of human painting or stroke tracking data.

This paper addresses the problem of learning the optimal control policy for a nonlinear stochastic dynamical system with continuous state space, continuous action space and unknown dynamics. This class of problems are typically addressed in stochastic adaptive control and reinforcement learning literature using model-based and model-free approaches respectively. Both methods rely on solving a dynamic programming problem, either directly or indirectly, for finding the optimal closed loop control policy. The inherent `curse of dimensionality' associated with dynamic programming method makes these approaches also computationally difficult. This paper proposes a novel decoupled data-based control (D2C) algorithm that addresses this problem using a decoupled, `open loop - closed loop', approach. First, an open-loop deterministic trajectory optimization problem is solved using a black-box simulation model of the dynamical system. Then, a closed loop control is developed around this open loop trajectory by linearization of the dynamics about this nominal trajectory. By virtue of linearization, a linear quadratic regulator based algorithm can be used for this closed loop control. We show that the performance of D2C algorithm is approximately optimal. Moreover, simulation performance suggests significant reduction in training time compared to other state of the art algorithms.

Predicting the outcomes of integrating Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) into the National Aerospace (NAS) is a complex problem which is required to be addressed by simulation studies before allowing the routine access of UAS into the NAS. This thesis focuses on providing 2D and 3D simulation frameworks using a game theoretical methodology to evaluate integration concepts in scenarios where manned and unmanned air vehicles co-exist. The fundamental gap in the literature is that the models of interaction between manned and unmanned vehicles are insufficient: a) they assume that pilot behavior is known a priori and b) they disregard decision making processes. The contribution of this work is to propose a modeling framework, in which, human pilot reactions are modeled using reinforcement learning and a game theoretical concept called level-k reasoning to fill this gap. The level-k reasoning concept is based on the assumption that humans have various levels of decision making. Reinforcement learning is a mathematical learning method that is rooted in human learning. In this work, a classical and an approximate reinforcement learning (Neural Fitted Q Iteration) methods are used to model time-extended decisions of pilots with 2D and 3D maneuvers. An analysis of UAS integration is conducted using example scenarios in the presence of manned aircraft and fully autonomous UAS equipped with sense and avoid algorithms.

Reinforcement learning (RL) constitutes a promising solution for alleviating the problem of traffic congestion. In particular, deep RL algorithms have been shown to produce adaptive traffic signal controllers that outperform conventional systems. However, in order to be reliable in highly dynamic urban areas, such controllers need to be robust with the respect to a series of exogenous sources of uncertainty. In this paper, we develop an open-source callback-based framework for promoting the flexible evaluation of different deep RL configurations under a traffic simulation environment. With this framework, we demonstrate how deep RL-based adaptive traffic controllers perform under different scenarios, namely under demand surges caused by special events, capacity reductions from incidents and sensor failures. We extract several key insights for the development of robust deep RL algorithms for traffic control and propose concrete designs to mitigate the impact of the considered exogenous uncertainties.

This paper presents Rogue-Gym, that enables agents to learn and play a subset of the original Rogue game with the OpenAI Gym interface. In roguelike games, a player explores a dungeon where each floor is two dimensional grid maze with enemies, golds, and downstairs. Because the map of a dungeon is different each time an agent starts a new game, learning in Rogue-Gym inevitably involves generalization of experiences, in a highly abstract manner. We argue that this generalization in reinforcement learning is a big challenge for AI agents. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has succeeded in many games. However, it has been pointed out that agents trained by DRL methods often overfit to the training environment. To investigate this problem, some research environments with procedural content generation have been proposed. Following these studies, we show that our Rogue-Gym imposes a new generalization problem of their policies. In our experiments, we evaluate a standard reinforcement learning method, PPO, with and without enhancements for generalization. The results show that some enhancements work effective, but that there is still a large room for improvement. Therefore, Rogue-Gym a is a new challenging domain for further studies.

Optimism about the poorly understood states and actions is the main driving force of exploration for many provably-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms. We propose optimism in the face of sensible value functions (OFVF)- a novel data-driven Bayesian algorithm to constructing Plausibility sets for MDPs to explore robustly minimizing the worst case exploration cost. The method computes policies with tighter optimistic estimates for exploration by introducing two new ideas. First, it is based on Bayesian posterior distributions rather than distribution-free bounds. Second, OFVF does not construct plausibility sets as simple confidence intervals. Confidence intervals as plausibility sets are a sufficient but not a necessary condition. OFVF uses the structure of the value function to optimize the location and shape of the plausibility set to guarantee upper bounds directly without necessarily enforcing the requirement for the set to be a confidence interval. OFVF proceeds in an episodic manner, where the duration of the episode is fixed and known. Our algorithm is inherently Bayesian and can leverage prior information. Our theoretical analysis shows the robustness of OFVF, and the empirical results demonstrate its practical promise.

The ability to use data about prior decisions and their outcomes to make counterfactual inferences about how alternative decision policies might perform, is a cornerstone of intelligent behavior. It also has immense practical potential - it can enable the use of electronic medical record data to infer better treatment decisions for patients, the use of prior product recommendations to inform more effective strategies for presenting recommendations, and previously collected data from students using educational software to better teach those and future students. Such counterfactual reasoning, particularly when one is deriving decision policies that will be used to make not one but a sequence of decisions, is important since online sampling during a learning procedure is both costly and dangerous, and not practical in many of the applications above. While amply motivated, doing such counterfactual reasoning is also challenging because the data is censored - we can only observe the result of providing a particular chemotherapy treatment policy to a particular patient, not the counterfactual of if we were then to start with a radiation sequence. We focus on the problem of performing such counterfactual inferences in the context of sequential decision making in a Markov decision process (MDP).

Traffic congestion is a growing problem that continues to plague urban areas with negative outcomes to both the traveling public and society as a whole. These negative outcomes will only grow over time as more people flock to urban areas. In 2014, traffic congestion costs Americans over $160 billion in lost productivity and wasted over 3.1 billion gallons of fuel [Economist 2014]. Traffic congestion was also attributed to over 56 billion pounds of harmful CO2 emissions in 2011 [Schrank et al. 2015]. In the European Union, the cost of traffic congestion was equivalent to 1% of the entire GDP [Schrank et al. 2012]. Mitigating congestion would have significant economic, environmental and societal benefits. Signalized intersections are one of the most prevalent bottleneck types in urban environments, and thus traffic signal control plays a vital role in urban traffic management.