Hello, I'm looking for some advice on school choices for someone from a non-traditional background (undergrad and current master in chemical engineering, focused on controls) for getting into the ML field. Currently doing 1st year of 2 in Master in chemical engineering, my research topic is applying reinforcement learning to optimal control problems in smart grid energy management/demand-side management. I've been learning ML and RL for the past 3 years, can currently keep up with papers, implement these papers in Tensorflow, Pytorch and working on some additional personal projects (Deep RL related). Ultimately I'd like to work in a ML/RL research or applied position (non-academic, in private company research labs). My current worry is that my chem eng background is a bit of a non-traditional background, and I'm not sure how much of that will hinder my goal for getting the jobs I'm aiming for.

Fuzzy controllers are efficient and interpretable system controllers for continuous state and action spaces. To date, such controllers have been constructed manually or trained automatically either using expert-generated problem-specific cost functions or incorporating detailed knowledge about the optimal control strategy. Both requirements for automatic training processes are not found in most real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems. In such applications, online learning is often prohibited for safety reasons because online learning requires exploration of the problem's dynamics during policy training. We introduce a fuzzy particle swarm reinforcement learning (FPSRL) approach that can construct fuzzy RL policies solely by training parameters on world models that simulate real system dynamics. These world models are created by employing an autonomous machine learning technique that uses previously generated transition samples of a real system. To the best of our knowledge, this approach is the first to relate self-organizing fuzzy controllers to model-based batch RL. Therefore, FPSRL is intended to solve problems in domains where online learning is prohibited, system dynamics are relatively easy to model from previously generated default policy transition samples, and it is expected that a relatively easily interpretable control policy exists. The efficiency of the proposed approach with problems from such domains is demonstrated using three standard RL benchmarks, i.e., mountain car, cart-pole balancing, and cart-pole swing-up. Our experimental results demonstrate high-performing, interpretable fuzzy policies.

Attention readers: We invite you to access the corresponding Python code and iPython notebooks for this article on GitHub. Reinforcement learning (RL) is about training agents to complete tasks. We typically think of this as being able to accomplish some goal. Take, for example, a robot we might want to train to open a door. Reinforcement learning can be used as a framework for teaching the robot to open the door by allowing it to learn from trial and error.

In this paper we present UbuntuWorld 1.0 LTS - a platform for developing automated technical support agents in the Ubuntu operating system. Specifically, we propose to use the Bash terminal as a simulator of the Ubuntu environment for a learning-based agent, and demonstrate the usefulness of adopting reinforcement learning (RL) techniques for basic problem solving and troubleshooting in this environment. We provide a plug-and-play interface to the simulator as a python package where different types of agents can be plugged in and evaluated, and provide pathways for integrating data from online support forums like Ask Ubuntu into an automated agent's learning process. Finally, we show that the use of this data significantly improves the agent's learning efficiency. We believe that this platform can be adopted as a real-world test bed for research on automated technical support.

In the blog "From Autonomous to Smart: Importance of Artificial Intelligence," we laid out the artificial intelligence (AI) challenges in creating "smart" edge devices: We also talked about how Moore's Law isn't going to bail us out of these challenges; that the growth of Internet of Things (IOT) data and the complexity of the problems that we are trying to address at the edge (think "smart" cars) is growing much faster than Moore's Law can accommodate. So we are going to use this blog to deep dive into the category of artificial intelligence called reinforcement learning. We are going to see how reinforcement learning might help us to address these challenges; to work smarter at the edge when brute force technology advances will not suffice. With the rapid increases in computing power, it's easy to get seduced into thinking that raw computing power can solve problems like smart edge devices (e.g., cars, trains, airplanes, wind turbines, jet engines, medical devices). Look at the dramatic increase in the number of possible moves between checkers and chess even though the board layout is exactly the same. The only difference between checkers and chess is the types of moves that pieces can make.

Automatic decision-making approaches, such as reinforcement learning (RL), have been applied to (partially) solve the resource allocation problem adaptively in the cloud computing system. However, a complete cloud resource allocation framework exhibits high dimensions in state and action spaces, which prohibit the usefulness of traditional RL techniques. In addition, high power consumption has become one of the critical concerns in design and control of cloud computing systems, which degrades system reliability and increases cooling cost. An effective dynamic power management (DPM) policy should minimize power consumption while maintaining performance degradation within an acceptable level. Thus, a joint virtual machine (VM) resource allocation and power management framework is critical to the overall cloud computing system. Moreover, novel solution framework is necessary to address the even higher dimensions in state and action spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical framework for solving the overall resource allocation and power management problem in cloud computing systems. The proposed hierarchical framework comprises a global tier for VM resource allocation to the servers and a local tier for distributed power management of local servers. The emerging deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique, which can deal with complicated control problems with large state space, is adopted to solve the global tier problem. Furthermore, an autoencoder and a novel weight sharing structure are adopted to handle the high-dimensional state space and accelerate the convergence speed. On the other hand, the local tier of distributed server power managements comprises an LSTM based workload predictor and a model-free RL based power manager, operating in a distributed manner.

Two Minute Papers reviews how DeepMind learned how to play the Atari classic "Break Out" simply by observing the game being played from a video feed. The original paper "Imagination-Augmented Agents for Deep Reinforcement Learning" is online at https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06203

Novice here: I really want to try this Starcraft API but I don't know how to start. I believe this uses more reinforcement learning and agent-based models (which honestly I am not familiar with yet) What are good papers to get started on this?

In an upcoming screencast I'm doing with O'Reilly I'll be discussing what reinforcement learning is and how it applies. I figured I'd give you all a little behind the scenes look.

We approach structured output prediction by optimizing a deep value network (DVN) to precisely estimate the task loss on different output configurations for a given input. Once the model is trained, we perform inference by gradient descent on the continuous relaxations of the output variables to find outputs with promising scores from the value network. When applied to image segmentation, the value network takes an image and a segmentation mask as inputs and predicts a scalar estimating the intersection over union between the input and ground truth masks. For multi-label classification, the DVN's objective is to correctly predict the F1 score for any potential label configuration. The DVN framework achieves the state-of-the-art results on multi-label prediction and image segmentation benchmarks.