No Arabic abstract
We introduce a unified probabilistic framework for solving sequential decision making problems ranging from Bayesian optimisation to contextual bandits and reinforcement learning. This is accomplished by a probabilistic model-based approach that explains observed data while capturing predictive uncertainty during the decision making process. Crucially, this probabilistic model is chosen to be a Meta-Learning system that allows learning from a distribution of related problems, allowing data efficient adaptation to a target task. As a suitable instantiation of this framework, we explore the use of Neural processes due to statistical and computational desiderata. We apply our framework to a broad range of problem domains, such as control problems, recommender systems and adversarial attacks on RL agents, demonstrating an efficient and general black-box learning approach.
The Markov assumption (MA) is fundamental to the empirical validity of reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Forward-Backward Learning procedure to test MA in sequential decision making. The proposed test does not assume any parametric form on the joint distribution of the observed data and plays an important role for identifying the optimal policy in high-order Markov decision processes and partially observable MDPs. We apply our test to both synthetic datasets and a real data example from mobile health studies to illustrate its usefulness.
Active learning is usually applied to acquire labels of informative data points in supervised learning, to maximize accuracy in a sample-efficient way. However, maximizing the accuracy is not the end goal when the results are used for decision-making, for example in personalized medicine or economics. We argue that when acquiring samples sequentially, separating learning and decision-making is sub-optimal, and we introduce a novel active learning strategy which takes the down-the-line decision problem into account. Specifically, we introduce a novel active learning criterion which maximizes the expected information gain on the posterior distribution of the optimal decision. We compare our decision-making-aware active learning strategy to existing alternatives on both simulated and real data, and show improved performance in decision-making accuracy.
Learning from demonstrations has made great progress over the past few years. However, it is generally data hungry and task specific. In other words, it requires a large amount of data to train a decent model on a particular task, and the model often fails to generalize to new tasks that have a different distribution. In practice, demonstrations from new tasks will be continuously observed and the data might be unlabeled or only partially labeled. Therefore, it is desirable for the trained model to adapt to new tasks that have limited data samples available. In this work, we build an adaptable imitation learning model based on the integration of Meta-learning and Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning (Meta-AIRL). We exploit the adversarial learning and inverse reinforcement learning mechanisms to learn policies and reward functions simultaneously from available training tasks and then adapt them to new tasks with the meta-learning framework. Simulation results show that the adapted policy trained with Meta-AIRL can effectively learn from limited number of demonstrations, and quickly reach the performance comparable to that of the experts on unseen tasks.
Regret minimization has proved to be a versatile tool for tree-form sequential decision making and extensive-form games. In large two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games, modern extensions of counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) are currently the practical state of the art for computing a Nash equilibrium. Most regret-minimization algorithms for tree-form sequential decision making, including CFR, require (i) an exact model of the players decision nodes, observation nodes, and how they are linked, and (ii) full knowledge, at all times t, about the payoffs -- even in parts of the decision space that are not encountered at time t. Recently, there has been growing interest towards relaxing some of those restrictions and making regret minimization applicable to settings for which reinforcement learning methods have traditionally been used -- for example, those in which only black-box access to the environment is available. We give the first, to our knowledge, regret-minimization algorithm that guarantees sublinear regret with high probability even when requirement (i) -- and thus also (ii) -- is dropped. We formalize an online learning setting in which the strategy space is not known to the agent and gets revealed incrementally whenever the agent encounters new decision points. We give an efficient algorithm that achieves $O(T^{3/4})$ regret with high probability for that setting, even when the agent faces an adversarial environment. Our experiments show it significantly outperforms the prior algorithms for the problem, which do not have such guarantees. It can be used in any application for which regret minimization is useful: approximating Nash equilibrium or quantal response equilibrium, approximating coarse correlated equilibrium in multi-player games, learning a best response, learning safe opponent exploitation, and online play against an unknown opponent/environment.
Robots frequently face complex tasks that require more than one action, where sequential decision-making (SDM) capabilities become necessary. The key contribution of this work is a robot SDM framework, called LCORPP, that supports the simultaneous capabilities of supervised learning for passive state estimation, automated reasoning with declarative human knowledge, and planning under uncertainty toward achieving long-term goals. In particular, we use a hybrid reasoning paradigm to refine the state estimator, and provide informative priors for the probabilistic planner. In experiments, a mobile robot is tasked with estimating human intentions using their motion trajectories, declarative contextual knowledge, and human-robot interaction (dialog-based and motion-based). Results suggest that, in efficiency and accuracy, our framework performs better than its no-learning and no-reasoning counterparts in office environment.