No Arabic abstract
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former are often too conservative in practical settings, while the latter require assumptions that are hard to verify in practice. We study bandit problems that fall between these two extremes, where the learning agent has access to sampled bandit instances from an unknown prior distribution $mathcal{P}$ and aims to achieve high reward on average over the bandit instances drawn from $mathcal{P}$. This setting is of a particular importance because it lays foundations for meta-learning of bandit policies and reflects more realistic assumptions in many practical domains. We propose the use of parameterized bandit policies that are differentiable and can be optimized using policy gradients. This provides a broadly applicable framework that is easy to implement. We derive reward gradients that reflect the structure of bandit problems and policies, for both non-contextual and contextual settings, and propose a number of interesting policies that are both differentiable and have low regret. Our algorithmic and theoretical contributions are supported by extensive experiments that show the importance of baseline subtraction, learned biases, and the practicality of our approach on a range problems.
In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient federated meta-learning framework. The objective is to enable learning a meta-model that can be fine-tuned to a new task with a few number of samples in a distributed setting and at low computation and communication energy consumption. We assume that each task is owned by a separate agent, so a limited number of tasks is used to train a meta-model. Assuming each task was trained offline on the agents local data, we propose a lightweight algorithm that starts from the local models of all agents, and in a backward manner using projected stochastic gradient ascent (P-SGA) finds a meta-model. The proposed method avoids complex computations such as computing hessian, double looping, and matrix inversion, while achieving high performance at significantly less energy consumption compared to the state-of-the-art methods such as MAML and iMAML on conducted experiments for sinusoid regression and image classification tasks.
In this work, we propose a simple yet effective meta-learning algorithm in semi-supervised learning. We notice that most existing consistency-based approaches suffer from overfitting and limited model generalization ability, especially when training with only a small number of labeled data. To alleviate this issue, we propose a learn-to-generalize regularization term by utilizing the label information and optimize the problem in a meta-learning fashion. Specifically, we seek the pseudo labels of the unlabeled data so that the model can generalize well on the labeled data, which is formulated as a nested optimization problem. We address this problem using the meta-gradient that bridges between the pseudo label and the regularization term. In addition, we introduce a simple first-order approximation to avoid computing higher-order derivatives and provide theoretic convergence analysis. Extensive evaluations on the SVHN, CIFAR, and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.
A fundamental issue in reinforcement learning algorithms is the balance between exploration of the environment and exploitation of information already obtained by the agent. Especially, exploration has played a critical role for both efficiency and efficacy of the learning process. However, Existing works for exploration involve task-agnostic design, that is performing well in one environment, but be ill-suited to another. To the purpose of learning an effective and efficient exploration policy in an automated manner. We formalized a feasible metric for measuring the utility of exploration based on counterfactual ideology. Based on that, We proposed an end-to-end algorithm to learn exploration policy by meta-learning. We demonstrate that our method achieves good results compared to previous works in the high-dimensional control tasks in MuJoCo simulator.
Many successful deep learning architectures are equivariant to certain transformations in order to conserve parameters and improve generalization: most famously, convolution layers are equivariant to shifts of the input. This approach only works when practitioners know the symmetries of the task and can manually construct an architecture with the corresponding equivariances. Our goal is an approach for learning equivariances from data, without needing to design custom task-specific architectures. We present a method for learning and encoding equivariances into networks by learning corresponding parameter sharing patterns from data. Our method can provably represent equivariance-inducing parameter sharing for any finite group of symmetry transformations. Our experiments suggest that it can automatically learn to encode equivariances to common transformations used in image processing tasks. We provide our experiment code at https://github.com/AllanYangZhou/metalearning-symmetries.
The goal of reinforcement learning algorithms is to estimate and/or optimise the value function. However, unlike supervised learning, no teacher or oracle is available to provide the true value function. Instead, the majority of reinforcement learning algorithms estimate and/or optimise a proxy for the value function. This proxy is typically based on a sampled and bootstrapped approximation to the true value function, known as a return. The particular choice of return is one of the chief components determining the nature of the algorithm: the rate at which future rewards are discounted; when and how values should be bootstrapped; or even the nature of the rewards themselves. It is well-known that these decisions are crucial to the overall success of RL algorithms. We discuss a gradient-based meta-learning algorithm that is able to adapt the nature of the return, online, whilst interacting and learning from the environment. When applied to 57 games on the Atari 2600 environment over 200 million frames, our algorithm achieved a new state-of-the-art performance.