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 Reinforcement Learning


From Games to Assembly Lines, Robots Learn Faster Than Ever

#artificialintelligence

A new artificial intelligence startup called Osaro aims to give industrial robots the same turbocharge that DeepMind Technologies gave Atari-playing computer programs. In December 2013, DeepMind showcased a type of artificial intelligence that had mastered seven Atari 2600 games from scratch in a matter of hours, and could outperform some of the best human players. Google swiftly snapped up the London-based company, and the deep-reinforcement learning technology behind it, for a reported $400 million. Now Osaro, with $3.3 million in investments from the likes of Peter Thiel and Jerry Yang, claims to have taken deep-reinforcement learning to the next level, delivering the same superhuman AI performance but over 100 times as fast. Deep-reinforcement learning arose from deep learning, a method of using multiple layers of neural networks to efficiently process and organize mountains of raw data (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning").


Reward Function for q learning on a robot

#artificialintelligence

I have 2 wheeled differential drive robot which I use pid for low level control to follow line. I implemented q learning which uses samples for 16 iterations then uses them to decide the best position to be on the line so car takes the turn from there. This allows PID to setup and smooth fast following. My question is how can I setup a reward function that improves the performance i.e. lets the q learning to find the best What it tries to learn is this, it has 16 inputs which contains the line positions for the last 15 iterations and this iteration. Line position is between -1 and 1 which -1 means only left most sensor sees the line and 0 means the line is in the center.


[R] Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks โ€ข /r/MachineLearning

#artificialintelligence

Can someone explain how does the Loss function workout in the model's favor in 3.4 UNREAL AGENT? They're combining the loss function at first: The primary policy is trained with A3C, then The auxiliary tasks are trained on very recent sequences. Then it says "In practice, the loss is broken down into separate components that are applied either on-policy, directly from experience; or off-policy, on replayed transitions." What decided to apply which to either of the mentioned above components?


5 EBooks to Read Before Getting into A Machine Learning Career

#artificialintelligence

Don't know where to start? If you are looking for something more, you could look here for an overview of MOOCs and online lectures from freely-available university lectures. Of course, nothing substitutes rigorous formal education, but let's say that isn't in the cards for whatever reason. Not all machine learning positions require a PhD; it really depends where on the machine learning spectrum one wants to fit in. Check out this motivating and inspirational post, the author of which went from little understanding of machine learning to actively and effectively utilizing techniques in their job within a year.


Reinforcement Learning - Part 1

#artificialintelligence

I'm going to begin a multipart series of posts on Reinforcement Learning (RL) that roughly follow an old 1996 textbook "Reinforcement Learning An Introduction" by Sutton and Barto. From my research, this text still seems to be the most thorough introduction to RL I could find. The Barto & Sutton text is itself a great read and is fairly approachable even for beginners, but I still think it's worth breaking down even further. It still amazes me how most of machine learning theory was established decades ago yet we've seen a huge explosion of interest and use in just the past several years largely due to dramatic improvements in computational power (i.e.


RL$^2$: Fast Reinforcement Learning via Slow Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has been successful in learning sophisticated behaviors automatically; however, the learning process requires a huge number of trials. In contrast, animals can learn new tasks in just a few trials, benefiting from their prior knowledge about the world. This paper seeks to bridge this gap. Rather than designing a "fast" reinforcement learning algorithm, we propose to represent it as a recurrent neural network (RNN) and learn it from data. In our proposed method, RL$^2$, the algorithm is encoded in the weights of the RNN, which are learned slowly through a general-purpose ("slow") RL algorithm. The RNN receives all information a typical RL algorithm would receive, including observations, actions, rewards, and termination flags; and it retains its state across episodes in a given Markov Decision Process (MDP). The activations of the RNN store the state of the "fast" RL algorithm on the current (previously unseen) MDP. We evaluate RL$^2$ experimentally on both small-scale and large-scale problems. On the small-scale side, we train it to solve randomly generated multi-arm bandit problems and finite MDPs. After RL$^2$ is trained, its performance on new MDPs is close to human-designed algorithms with optimality guarantees. On the large-scale side, we test RL$^2$ on a vision-based navigation task and show that it scales up to high-dimensional problems.



Safe and Efficient Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this work, we take a fresh look at some old and new algorithms for off-policy, return-based reinforcement learning. Expressing these in a common form, we derive a novel algorithm, Retrace($\lambda$), with three desired properties: (1) it has low variance; (2) it safely uses samples collected from any behaviour policy, whatever its degree of "off-policyness"; and (3) it is efficient as it makes the best use of samples collected from near on-policy behaviour policies. We analyze the contractive nature of the related operator under both off-policy policy evaluation and control settings and derive online sample-based algorithms. We believe this is the first return-based off-policy control algorithm converging a.s. to $Q^*$ without the GLIE assumption (Greedy in the Limit with Infinite Exploration). As a corollary, we prove the convergence of Watkins' Q($\lambda$), which was an open problem since 1989. We illustrate the benefits of Retrace($\lambda$) on a standard suite of Atari 2600 games.


Reinforcement Learning Approach for Parallelization in Filters Aggregation Based Feature Selection Algorithms

arXiv.org Machine Learning

One of the classical problems in machine learning and data mining is feature selection. A feature selection algorithm is expected to be quick, and at the same time it should show high performance. MeLiF algorithm effectively solves this problem using ensembles of ranking filters. This article describes two different ways to improve MeLiF algorithm performance with parallelization. Experiments show that proposed schemes significantly improves algorithm performance and increase feature selection quality.


Learning to Play in a Day: Faster Deep Reinforcement Learning by Optimality Tightening

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We propose a novel training algorithm for reinforcement learning which combines the strength of deep Q-learning with a constrained optimization approach to tighten optimality and encourage faster reward propagation. Our novel technique makes deep reinforcement learning more practical by drastically reducing the training time. We evaluate the performance of our approach on the 49 games of the challenging Arcade Learning Environment, and report significant improvements in both training time and accuracy.