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Reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to significantly improve clinical decision making. However, treatment policies learned via RL from observational data are sensitive to subtle choices in study design. We highlight a simple approach, trajectory inspection, to bring clinicians into an iterative design process for model-based RL studies. We identify where the model recommends unexpectedly aggressive treatments or expects surprisingly positive outcomes from its recommendations. Then, we examine clinical trajectories simulated with the learned model and policy alongside the actual hospital course. Applying this approach to recent work on RL for sepsis management, we uncover a model bias towards discharge, a preference for high vasopressor doses that may be linked to small sample sizes, and clinically implausible expectations of discharge without weaning off vasopressors. We hope that iterations of detecting and addressing the issues unearthed by our method will result in RL policies that inspire more confidence in deployment.
As a notable machine learning paradigm, the research efforts in the context of reinforcement learning have certainly progressed leaps and bounds. When compared with reinforcement learning methods with the given system model, the methodology of the reinforcement learning architecture based on the unknown model generally exhibits significantly broader universality and applicability. In this work, a new reinforcement learning architecture based on iterative linear quadratic regulator (iLQR) is developed and presented without the requirement of any prior knowledge of the system model, which is termed as an approach of a neural network iterative linear quadratic regulator (NNiLQR). Depending solely on measurement data, this method yields a completely new non-parametric routine for the establishment of the optimal policy (without the necessity of system modeling) through iterative refinements of the neural network system. Rather importantly, this approach significantly outperforms the classical iLQR method in terms of the given objective function because of the innovative utilization of further exploration in the methodology. As clearly indicated from the results attained in two illustrative examples, these significant merits of the NNiLQR method are demonstrated rather evidently.
Machine learning, especially deep learning, is dramatically changing the methods associated with optical thin-film inverse design. The vast majority of this research has focused on the parameter optimization (layer thickness, and structure size) of optical thin-films. A challenging problem that arises is an automated material search. In this work, we propose a new end-to-end algorithm for optical thin-film inverse design. This method combines the ability of unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning(RL) and includes a genetic algorithm to design an optical thin-film without any human intervention. Furthermore, with several concrete examples, we have shown how one can use this technique to optimize the spectra of a multi-layer solar absorber device.
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of learning the preferences of an agent from the observations of its behavior on a task. While this problem has been well investigated, the related problem of {em online} IRL---where the observations are incrementally accrued, yet the demands of the application often prohibit a full rerun of an IRL method---has received relatively less attention. We introduce the first formal framework for online IRL, called incremental IRL (I2RL), and a new method that advances maximum entropy IRL with hidden variables, to this setting. Our formal analysis shows that the new method has a monotonically improving performance with more demonstration data, as well as probabilistically bounded error, both under full and partial observability. Experiments in a simulated robotic application of penetrating a continuous patrol under occlusion shows the relatively improved performance and speed up of the new method and validates the utility of online IRL.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made remarkable achievements, but it still suffers from inadequate exploration strategies, sparse reward signals, and deceptive reward functions. These problems motivate the need for a more efficient and directed exploration. For solving this, a Population-guided Novelty Search (PNS) parallel learning method is proposed. In PNS, the population is divided into multiple sub-populations, each of which has one chief agent and several exploring agents. The role of the chief agent is to evaluate the policies learned by exploring agents and to share the optimal policy with all sub-populations. The role of exploring agents is to learn their policies in collaboration with the guidance of the optimal policy and, simultaneously, upload their policies to the chief agent. To balance exploration and exploitation, the Novelty Search (NS) is employed in chief agents to encourage policies with high novelty while maximizing per-episode performance. The introduction of sub-populations and NS mechanisms promote directed exploration and enables better policy search. In the numerical experiment section, the proposed scheme is applied to the twin delayed deep deterministic (TD3) policy gradient algorithm, and the effectiveness of PNS to promote exploration and improve performance in both continuous control domains and discrete control domains is demonstrated. Notably, the proposed method achieves rewards that far exceed the SOTA methods in Delayed MoJoCo environments.
Meta-reinforcement learning typically requires orders of magnitude more samples than single task reinforcement learning methods. This is because meta-training needs to deal with more diverse distributions and train extra components such as context encoders. To address this, we propose a novel self-supervised learning task, which we named Trajectory Contrastive Learning (TCL), to improve meta-training. TCL adopts contrastive learning and trains a context encoder to predict whether two transition windows are sampled from the same trajectory. TCL leverages the natural hierarchical structure of context-based meta-RL and makes minimal assumptions, allowing it to be generally applicable to context-based meta-RL algorithms. It accelerates the training of context encoders and improves meta-training overall. Experiments show that TCL performs better or comparably than a strong meta-RL baseline in most of the environments on both meta-RL MuJoCo (5 of 6) and Meta-World benchmarks (44 out of 50).