Publications

In this work we propose a method to compute continuous embeddings for kmers from raw RNA-seq data, in a reference-free fashion. We report th… (see more)at our model captures information of both DNA sequence similarity as well as DNA sequence abundance in the embedding latent space. We confirm the quality of these vectors by comparing them to known gene sub-structures and report that the latent space recovers exon information from raw RNA-Seq data from acute myeloid leukemia patients. Furthermore we show that this latent space allows the detection of genomic abnormalities such as translocations as well as patient-specific mutations, making this representation space both useful for visualization as well as analysis.

2018-09-26

ArXiv (preprint)

openreview.net

Universal Successor Features for Transfer Reinforcement Learning

Chen Ma

Dylan R. Ashley

Junfeng Wen

Yoshua Bengio

Transfer in Reinforcement Learning (RL) refers to the idea of applying knowledge gained from previous tasks to solving related tasks. Learni… (see more)ng a universal value function (Schaul et al., 2015), which generalizes over goals and states, has previously been shown to be useful for transfer. However, successor features are believed to be more suitable than values for transfer (Dayan, 1993; Barreto et al.,2017), even though they cannot directly generalize to new goals. In this paper, we propose (1) Universal Successor Features (USFs) to capture the underlying dynamics of the environment while allowing generalization to unseen goals and (2) a flexible end-to-end model of USFs that can be trained by interacting with the environment. We show that learning USFs is compatible with any RL algorithm that learns state values using a temporal difference method. Our experiments in a simple gridworld and with two MuJoCo environments show that USFs can greatly accelerate training when learning multiple tasks and can effectively transfer knowledge to new tasks.

2018-09-26

ArXiv (preprint)

openreview.net