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This paper presents a new neural architecture that combines a modulated Hebbian network (MOHN) with DQN, which we call modulated Hebbian plus Q network architecture (MOHQA). The hypothesis is that such a combination allows MOHQA to solve difficult partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) problems which impair temporal difference (TD)-based RL algorithms such as DQN, as the TD error cannot be easily derived from observations. The key idea is to use a Hebbian network with bio-inspired neural traces in order to bridge temporal delays between actions and rewards when confounding observations and sparse rewards result in inaccurate TD errors. In MOHQA, DQN learns low level features and control, while the MOHN contributes to the high-level decisions by associating rewards with past states and actions. Thus the proposed architecture combines two modules with significantly different learning algorithms, a Hebbian associative network and a classical DQN pipeline, exploiting the advantages of both. Simulations on a set of POMDPs and on the MALMO environment show that the proposed algorithm improved DQNs results and even outperformed control tests with A2C, QRDQN+LSTM and REINFORCE algorithms on some POMDPs with confounding stimuli and sparse rewards.
Cancer is a complex disease, the understanding and treatment of which are being aided through increases in the volume of collected data and in the scale of deployed computing power. Consequently, there is a growing need for the development of data-driven and, in particular, deep learning methods for various tasks such as cancer diagnosis, detection, prognosis, and prediction. Despite recent successes, however, designing high-performing deep learning models for nonimage and nontext cancer data is a time-consuming, trial-and-error, manual task that requires both cancer domain and deep learning expertise. To that end, we develop a reinforcement-learning-based neural architecture search to automate deep-learning-based predictive model development for a class of representative cancer data. We develop custom building blocks that allow domain experts to incorporate the cancer-data-specific characteristics. We show that our approach discovers deep neural network architectures that have significantly fewer trainable parameters, shorter training time, and accuracy similar to or higher than those of manually designed architectures. We study and demonstrate the scalability of our approach on up to 1,024 Intel Knights Landing nodes of the Theta supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without further interaction. However, in practice, offline RL presents a major challenge, and standard off-policy RL methods can fail due to overestimation of values induced by the distributional shift between the dataset and the learned policy, especially when training on complex and multi-modal data distributions. In this paper, we propose conservative Q-learning (CQL), which aims to address these limitations by learning a conservative Q-function such that the expected value of a policy under this Q-function lower-bounds its true value. We theoretically show that CQL produces a lower bound on the value of the current policy and that it can be incorporated into a policy learning procedure with theoretical improvement guarantees. In practice, CQL augments the standard Bellman error objective with a simple Q-value regularizer which is straightforward to implement on top of existing deep Q-learning and actor-critic implementations. On both discrete and continuous control domains, we show that CQL substantially outperforms existing offline RL methods, often learning policies that attain 2-5 times higher final return, especially when learning from complex and multi-modal data distributions.
Complex networks are often either too large for full exploration, partially accessible, or partially observed. Downstream learning tasks on these incomplete networks can produce low quality results. In addition, reducing the incompleteness of the network can be costly and nontrivial. As a result, network discovery algorithms optimized for specific downstream learning tasks given resource collection constraints are of great interest. In this paper, we formulate the task-specific network discovery problem in an incomplete network setting as a sequential decision making problem. Our downstream task is selective harvesting, the optimal collection of vertices with a particular attribute. We propose a framework, called Network Actor Critic (NAC), which learns a policy and notion of future reward in an offline setting via a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. The NAC paradigm utilizes a task-specific network embedding to reduce the state space complexity. A detailed comparative analysis of popular network embeddings is presented with respect to their role in supporting offline planning. Furthermore, a quantitative study is presented on several synthetic and real benchmarks using NAC and several baselines. We show that offline models of reward and network discovery policies lead to significantly improved performance when compared to competitive online discovery algorithms. Finally, we outline learning regimes where planning is critical in addressing sparse and changing reward signals.
This paper proposes a new robust update rule of target network for deep reinforcement learning (DRL), to replace the conventional update rule, given as an exponential moving average. The target network is for smoothly generating the reference signals for a main network in DRL, thereby reducing learning variance. The problem with its conventional update rule is the fact that all the parameters are smoothly copied with the same speed from the main network, even when some of them are trying to update toward the wrong directions. This behavior increases the risk of generating the wrong reference signals. Although slowing down the overall update speed is a naive way to mitigate wrong updates, it would decrease learning speed. To robustly update the parameters while keeping learning speed, a t-soft update method, which is inspired by student-t distribution, is derived with reference to the analogy between the exponential moving average and the normal distribution. Through the analysis of the derived t-soft update, we show that it takes over the properties of the student-t distribution. Specifically, with a heavy-tailed property of the student-t distribution, the t-soft update automatically excludes extreme updates that differ from past experiences. In addition, when the updates are similar to the past experiences, it can mitigate the learning delay by increasing the amount of updates. In PyBullet robotics simulations for DRL, an online actor-critic algorithm with the t-soft update outperformed the conventional methods in terms of the obtained return and/or its variance. From the training process by the t-soft update, we found that the t-soft update is globally consistent with the standard soft update, and the update rates are locally adjusted for acceleration or suppression.
The reinforcement learning community has made great strides in designing algorithms capable of exceeding human performance on specific tasks. These algorithms are mostly trained one task at the time, each new task requiring to train a brand new agent instance. This means the learning algorithm is general, but each solution is not; each agent can only solve the one task it was trained on. In this work, we study the problem of learning to master not one but multiple sequential-decision tasks at once. A general issue in multi-task learning is that a balance must be found between the needs of multiple tasks competing for the limited resources of a single learning system. Many learning algorithms can get distracted by certain tasks in the set of tasks to solve. Such tasks appear more salient to the learning process, for instance because of the density or magnitude of the in-task rewards. This causes the algorithm to focus on those salient tasks at the expense of generality. We propose to automatically adapt the contribution of each task to the agents updates, so that all tasks have a similar impact on the learning dynamics. This resulted in state of the art performance on learning to play all games in a set of 57 diverse Atari games. Excitingly, our method learned a single trained policy - with a single set of weights - that exceeds median human performance. To our knowledge, this was the first time a single agent surpassed human-level performance on this multi-task domain. The same approach also demonstrated state of the art performance on a set of 30 tasks in the 3D reinforcement learning platform DeepMind Lab.