This paper investigates a type of instability that is linked to the greedy policy improvement in approximated reinforcement learning. We show empirically that non-deterministic policy improvement can stabilize methods like LSPI by controlling the improvements' stochasticity. Additionally we show that a suitable representation of the value function also stabilizes the solution to some degree. The presented approach is simple and should also be easily transferable to more sophisticated algorithms like deep reinforcement learning.

Mini World of Bits ("MiniWoB") is a benchmark for reinforcement learning agents who interact with websites. The agents perceive the raw pixels of a small (210x160 pixel) webpage and produce keyboard and mouse actions. The environments are written in HTML/Javascript/CSS and are designed to test the agent's capacity to interact with common web browser elements, such as buttons, text fields, slides, date pickers, etc. The environments of this benchmark are accessible through the OpenAI Universe. Each environment is an HTML page that is 210 pixels high, 160px wide (i.e.

Representing a dialog policy as a recurrent neural network (RNN) is attractive because it handles partial observability, infers a latent representation of state, and can be optimized with supervised learning (SL) or reinforcement learning (RL). For RL, a policy gradient approach is natural, but is sample inefficient. In this paper, we present 3 methods for reducing the number of dialogs required to optimize an RNN-based dialog policy with RL. The key idea is to maintain a second RNN which predicts the value of the current policy, and to apply experience replay to both networks. On two tasks, these methods reduce the number of dialogs/episodes required by about a third, vs. standard policy gradient methods.

I'd love to see us advance these new ideas, whether its memory, reinforcement learning, or transfer learning, unsupervised learning. Deep learning has certainly been successful, but it's only a very approximate simulation of what goes on in the brain. All of these areas of research will expand the capabilities of this tool called deep learning dramatically. Deep learning has given us an algorithm that can finally allow robots to learn for themselves, from high-level goals, and through iteration discover for itself. Nvidia's CEO says his hardware will revolutionize robotics and that his chips can learn from Google's AlphaGo.

If you're a data scientist thinking about expanding your career options into AI you've got a forest and trees problem. There's a lot going on in deep learning and reinforcement learning but do these areas hold the best future job prospects or do we need to be looking a little further forward? To try to answer that question we'll have to get out of the weeds of current development and get a higher level perspective about where this is all headed. The roots of AI are actually in the behavioral sciences migrating eventually into biology and neurology. Since the earliest imaginings of what AI might be like those thoughts have focused on machines that could behave and make decisions like humans.

For a deep dive into the current state of AI and where we might be headed in coming years, check out our free ebook "What is Artificial Intelligence," by Mike Loukides and Ben Lorica. A robot takes a big step forward, then falls. The next time, it takes a smaller step and is able to hold its balance. The robot tries variations like this many times; eventually, it learns the right size of steps to take and walks steadily. What we see here is called reinforcement learning. It directly connects a robot's action with an outcome, without the robot having to learn a complex relationship between its action and results. The robot learns how to walk based on reward (staying on balance) and punishment (falling).

Reinforcement learning is considered to be a strong AI paradigm which can be used to teach machines through interaction with the environment and learning from their mistakes, but it has not yet been successfully used for automotive applications. There has recently been a revival of interest in the topic, however, driven by the ability of deep learning algorithms to learn good representations of the environment. Motivated by Google DeepMind's successful demonstrations of learning for games from Breakout to Go, we will propose different methods for autonomous driving using deep reinforcement learning. This is of particular interest as it is difficult to pose autonomous driving as a supervised learning problem as it has a strong interaction with the environment including other vehicles, pedestrians and roadworks. As this is a relatively new area of research for autonomous driving, we will formulate two main categories of algorithms: 1) Discrete actions category, and 2) Continuous actions category. For the discrete actions category, we will deal with Deep Q-Network Algorithm (DQN) while for the continuous actions category, we will deal with Deep Deterministic Actor Critic Algorithm (DDAC). In addition to that, We will also discover the performance of these two categories on an open source car simulator for Racing called (TORCS) which stands for The Open Racing car Simulator. Our simulation results demonstrate learning of autonomous maneuvering in a scenario of complex road curvatures and simple interaction with other vehicles. Finally, we explain the effect of some restricted conditions, put on the car during the learning phase, on the convergence time for finishing its learning phase.

Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent

2048 is an engaging single-player, nondeterministic video puzzle game, which, thanks to the simple rules and hard-to-master gameplay, has gained massive popularity in recent years. As 2048 can be conveniently embedded into the discrete-state Markov decision processes framework, we treat it as a testbed for evaluating existing and new methods in reinforcement learning. With the aim to develop a strong 2048 playing program, we employ temporal difference learning with systematic n-tuple networks. We show that this basic method can be significantly improved with temporal coherence learning, multi-stage function approximator with weight promotion, carousel shaping, and redundant encoding. In addition, we demonstrate how to take advantage of the characteristics of the n-tuple network, to improve the algorithmic effectiveness of the learning process by i) delaying the (decayed) update and applying lock-free optimistic parallelism to effortlessly make advantage of multiple CPU cores. This way, we were able to develop the best known 2048 playing program to date, which confirms the effectiveness of the introduced methods for discrete-state Markov decision problems.

In recent years, we've seen a resurgence in AI, or artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Machine learning has led to some amazing results, like being able to analyze medical images and predict diseases on-par with human experts. Google's AlphaGo program was able to beat a world champion in the strategy game go using deep reinforcement learning. Machine learning is even being used to program self driving cars, which is going to change the automotive industry forever. Imagine a world with drastically reduced car accidents, simply by removing the element of human error.