Reinforcement Learning
NervanaSystems/coach
Coach is a python reinforcement learning framework containing implementation of many state-of-the-art algorithms. It exposes a set of easy-to-use APIs for experimenting with new RL algorithms, and allows simple integration of new environments to solve. Basic RL components (algorithms, environments, neural network architectures, exploration policies, ...) are well decoupled, so that extending and reusing existing components is fairly painless. Contacting the Coach development team is also possible through the email coach@intel.com One of the main challenges when building a research project, or a solution based on a published algorithm, is getting a concrete and reliable baseline that reproduces the algorithm's results, as reported by its authors.
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Towards Physically Safe Reinforcement Learning under Supervision
Zhang, Yinan, Balkcom, Devin, Li, Haoxiang
This paper addresses the question of how a previously available control policy $\pi_s$ can be used as a supervisor to more quickly and safely train a new learned control policy $\pi_L$ for a robot. A weighted average of the supervisor and learned policies is used during trials, with a heavier weight initially on the supervisor, in order to allow safe and useful physical trials while the learned policy is still ineffective. During the process, the weight is adjusted to favor the learned policy. As weights are adjusted, the learned network must compensate so as to give safe and reasonable outputs under the different weights. A pioneer network is introduced that pre-learns a policy that performs similarly to the current learned policy under the planned next step for new weights; this pioneer network then replaces the currently learned network in the next set of trials. Experiments in OpenAI Gym demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Reinforcement Learning: The Power of Big Data in Call Centers
If you're deeply involved in the study of artificial intelligence or automated predictive modeling, you may have come across the term "reinforcement learning," or mapping situations to actions to maximize some type of numerical reward signal. For humans, this process occurs naturally as we grow and experiment with our surroundings and see how our actions influence our rewards. Reinforcement learning deviates greatly from the normal means by which artificial intelligences are typically programmed. As noted in the book Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto, "the most important feature distinguishing reinforcement learning from other types of learning is that it uses training information that evaluates the action taken rather than instructs by giving correct actions." In short, reinforcement learning "teaches" machines how to learn from past experience and exploit that information to maximize a reward.
Ten Machine Learning Algorithms You Should Know to Become a Data Scientist - ParallelDots
Let's say I am given an Excel sheet with data about various fruits and I have to tell which look like Apples. What I will do is ask a question "Which fruits are red and round?" and divide all fruits which answer yes and no to the question. Now, All Red and Round fruits might not be apples and all apples won't be red and round. So I will ask a question "Which fruits have red or yellow color hints on them? " on red and round fruits and will ask "Which fruits are green and round?" on not red and round fruits. Based on these questions I can tell with considerable accuracy which are apples. This cascade of questions is what a decision tree is. However, this is a decision tree based on my intuition.
Lifelong Federated Reinforcement Learning: A Learning Architecture for Navigation in Cloud Robotic Systems
Liu, Boyi, Wang, Lujia, Liu, Ming, Xu, Chengzhong
This paper was motivated by the problem of how to make robots fuse and transfer their experience so that they can effectively use prior knowledge and quickly adapt to new environments. To address the problem, we present a learning architecture for navigation in cloud robotic systems: Lifelong Federated Reinforcement Learning (LFRLA). In the work, We propose a knowledge fusion algorithm for upgrading a shared model deployed on the cloud. Then, effective transfer learning methods in LFRLA are introduced. LFRLA is consistent with human cognitive science and fits well in cloud robotic systems. Experiments show that LFRLA greatly improves the efficiency of reinforcement learning for robot navigation. The cloud robotic system deployment also shows that LFRLA is capable of fusing prior knowledge. In addition, we release a cloud robotic navigation-learning website based on LFRLA.
On-Policy Trust Region Policy Optimisation with Replay Buffers
Kangin, Dmitry, Pugeault, Nicolas
Building upon the recent success of deep reinforcement learning methods, we investigate the possibility of on-policy reinforcement learning improvement by reusing the data from several consecutive policies. On-policy methods bring many benefits, such as ability to evaluate each resulting policy. However, they usually discard all the information about the policies which existed before. In this work, we propose adaptation of the replay buffer concept, borrowed from the off-policy learning setting, to create the method, combining advantages of on- and off-policy learning. To achieve this, the proposed algorithm generalises the $Q$-, value and advantage functions for data from multiple policies. The method uses trust region optimisation, while avoiding some of the common problems of the algorithms such as TRPO or ACKTR: it uses hyperparameters to replace the trust region selection heuristics, as well as the trainable covariance matrix instead of the fixed one. In many cases, the method not only improves the results comparing to the state-of-the-art trust region on-policy learning algorithms such as PPO, ACKTR and TRPO, but also with respect to their off-policy counterpart DDPG.
A robot dog has learned to run faster with machine learning
Reinforcement learning has helped a four-legged bot move a bit like a real animal, without having to be taught how to make each step. The news: Roboticists want their creations to mimic animals because animals invariably move in the most energy-efficient way. But the eerily lifelike movement of robots like Boston Dynamics' Spotmini is usually coded by hand. Now researchers have combined simulation with a technique called reinforcement learning to teach a dog-like robot called "ANYmal" to run faster and recover from falls. Crucially, it did so without any manual intervention.
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Embedded Game for the Optimization of Building Energy Control and Power System Planning
Most of the current game-theoretic demand-side management methods focus primarily on the scheduling of home appliances, and the related numerical experiments are analyzed under various scenarios to achieve the corresponding Nash-equilibrium (NE) and optimal results. However, not much work is conducted for academic or commercial buildings. The methods for optimizing academic-buildings are distinct from the optimal methods for home appliances. In my study, we address a novel methodology to control the operation of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system (HVAC). With the development of Artificial Intelligence and computer technologies, reinforcement learning (RL) can be implemented in multiple realistic scenarios and help people to solve thousands of real-world problems. Reinforcement Learning, which is considered as the art of future AI, builds the bridge between agents and environments through Markov Decision Chain or Neural Network and has seldom been used in power system. The art of RL is that once the simulator for a specific environment is built, the algorithm can keep learning from the environment. Therefore, RL is capable of dealing with constantly changing simulator inputs such as power demand, the condition of power system and outdoor temperature, etc. Compared with the existing distribution power system planning mechanisms and the related game theoretical methodologies, our proposed algorithm can plan and optimize the hourly energy usage, and have the ability to corporate with even shorter time window if needed.
Representation Learning on Graphs: A Reinforcement Learning Application
Madjiheurem, Sephora, Toni, Laura
In this work, we study value function approximation in reinforcement learning (RL) problems with high dimensional state or action spaces via a generalized version of representation policy iteration (RPI). We consider the limitations of proto-value functions (PVFs) at accurately approximating the value function in low dimensions and we highlight the importance of features learning for an improved low-dimensional value function approximation. Then, we adopt different representation learning algorithm on graphs to learn the basis functions that best represent the value function. We empirically show that node2vec, an algorithm for scalable feature learning in networks, and the Variational Graph Auto-Encoder constantly outperform the commonly used smooth proto-value functions in low-dimensional feature space.