Joelle Pineau

Damien Ernst

Raphael Fonteneau

When an agent has limited information on its environment, the suboptimality of an RL algorithm can be decomposed into the sum of two terms: … (voir plus)a term related to an asymptotic bias (suboptimality with unlimited data) and a term due to overfitting (additional suboptimality due to limited data). In the context of reinforcement learning with partial observability, this paper provides an analysis of the tradeoff between these two error sources. In particular, our theoretical analysis formally characterizes how a smaller state representation increases the asymptotic bias while decreasing the risk of overfitting.

2020-07-01

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publié)

A Large-Scale, Open-Domain, Mixed-Interface Dialogue-Based ITS for STEM

Iulian V. Serban

Varun Gupta

Ekaterina Kochmar

Dung D. Vu

Robert Belfer

2020-06-10

Artificial Intelligence in Education (publié)

Leveraging exploration in off-policy algorithms via normalizing flows

Thang Doan

Exploration is a crucial component for discovering approximately optimal policies in most high-dimensional reinforcement learning (RL) setti… (voir plus)ngs with sparse rewards. Approaches such as neural density models and continuous exploration (e.g., Go-Explore) have been instrumental in recent advances. Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a method for improving exploration that aims to combine off-policy updates while maximizing the policy entropy. We extend SAC to a richer class of probability distributions through normalizing flows, which we show improves performance in exploration, sample complexity, and convergence. Finally, we show that not only the normalizing flow policy outperforms SAC on MuJoCo domains, it is also significantly lighter, using as low as 5.6% of the original network's parameters for similar performance.

2020-05-12

Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning (publié)

proceedings.mlr.press

Literature Mining for Incorporating Inductive Bias in Biomedical Prediction Tasks (Student Abstract)

Qizhen Zhang

Audrey Durand

2020-04-03

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publié)

Provably efficient reconstruction of policy networks

Bogdan Mazoure

Thang Doan

Tianyu Li

Recent research has shown that learning poli-cies parametrized by large neural networks can achieve significant success on challenging reinf… (voir plus)orcement learning problems. However, when memory is limited, it is not always possible to store such models exactly for inference, and com-pressing the policy into a compact representation might be necessary. We propose a general framework for policy representation, which reduces this problem to finding a low-dimensional embedding of a given density function in a separable inner product space. Our framework allows us to de-rive strong theoretical guarantees, controlling the error of the reconstructed policies. Such guaran-tees are typically lacking in black-box models, but are very desirable in risk-sensitive tasks. Our experimental results suggest that the reconstructed policies can use less than 10%of the number of parameters in the original networks, while incurring almost no decrease in rewards.

2020-02-07

ArXiv (prépublication)

Representation of Reinforcement Learning Policies in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces.

Bogdan Mazoure

Thang Doan

Tianyu Li

We propose a general framework for policy representation for reinforcement learning tasks. This framework involves finding a low-dimensional… (voir plus) embedding of the policy on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The usage of RKHS based methods allows us to derive strong theoretical guarantees on the expected return of the reconstructed policy. Such guarantees are typically lacking in black-box models, but are very desirable in tasks requiring stability. We conduct several experiments on classic RL domains. The results confirm that the policies can be robustly embedded in a low-dimensional space while the embedded policy incurs almost no decrease in return.

Adversarial Soft Advantage Fitting: Imitation Learning without Policy Optimization

Paul Barde

Julien Roy

Wonseok Jeon

Chris Pal

Derek Nowrouzezahrai

Adversarial imitation learning alternates between learning a discriminator -- which tells apart expert's demonstrations from generated ones … (voir plus)-- and a generator's policy to produce trajectories that can fool this discriminator. This alternated optimization is known to be delicate in practice since it compounds unstable adversarial training with brittle and sample-inefficient reinforcement learning. We propose to remove the burden of the policy optimization steps by leveraging a novel discriminator formulation. Specifically, our discriminator is explicitly conditioned on two policies: the one from the previous generator's iteration and a learnable policy. When optimized, this discriminator directly learns the optimal generator's policy. Consequently, our discriminator's update solves the generator's optimization problem for free: learning a policy that imitates the expert does not require an additional optimization loop. This formulation effectively cuts by half the implementation and computational burden of adversarial imitation learning algorithms by removing the reinforcement learning phase altogether. We show on a variety of tasks that our simpler approach is competitive to prevalent imitation learning methods.

Language GANs Falling Short

Massimo Caccia

Lucas Caccia

William Fedus

Hugo Larochelle

Laurent Charlin

Generating high-quality text with sufficient diversity is essential for a wide range of Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. Maximum-Lik… (voir plus)elihood (MLE) models trained with teacher forcing have consistently been reported as weak baselines, where poor performance is attributed to exposure bias (Bengio et al., 2015; Ranzato et al., 2015); at inference time, the model is fed its own prediction instead of a ground-truth token, which can lead to accumulating errors and poor samples. This line of reasoning has led to an outbreak of adversarial based approaches for NLG, on the account that GANs do not suffer from exposure bias. In this work, we make several surprising observations which contradict common beliefs. First, we revisit the canonical evaluation framework for NLG, and point out fundamental flaws with quality-only evaluation: we show that one can outperform such metrics using a simple, well-known temperature parameter to artificially reduce the entropy of the model's conditional distributions. Second, we leverage the control over the quality / diversity trade-off given by this parameter to evaluate models over the whole quality-diversity spectrum and find MLE models constantly outperform the proposed GAN variants over the whole quality-diversity space. Our results have several implications: 1) The impact of exposure bias on sample quality is less severe than previously thought, 2) temperature tuning provides a better quality / diversity trade-off than adversarial training while being easier to train, easier to cross-validate, and less computationally expensive. Code to reproduce the experiments is available at github.com/pclucas14/GansFallingShort

2020-01-01

ICLR (publié)

openreview.net

Deep Generative Modeling of LiDAR Data

Lucas Caccia

Herke van Hoof

Aaron Courville

Building models capable of generating structured output is a key challenge for AI and robotics. While generative models have been explored o… (voir plus)n many types of data, little work has been done on synthesizing lidar scans, which play a key role in robot mapping and localization. In this work, we show that one can adapt deep generative models for this task by unravelling lidar scans into a 2D point map. Our approach can generate high quality samples, while simultaneously learning a meaningful latent representation of the data. We demonstrate significant improvements against state-of-the-art point cloud generation methods. Furthermore, we propose a novel data representation that augments the 2D signal with absolute positional information. We show that this helps robustness to noisy and imputed input; the learned model can recover the underlying lidar scan from seemingly uninformative data.

2019-11-03

2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (publié)

Attraction-Repulsion Actor-Critic for Continuous Control Reinforcement Learning

Thang Doan

Continuous control tasks in reinforcement learning are important because they provide an important framework for learning in high-dimensiona… (voir plus)l state spaces with deceptive rewards, where the agent can easily become trapped into suboptimal solutions. One way to avoid local optima is to use a population of agents to ensure coverage of the policy space, yet learning a population with the "best" coverage is still an open problem. In this work, we present a novel approach to population-based RL in continuous control that leverages properties of normalizing flows to perform attractive and repulsive operations between current members of the population and previously observed policies. Empirical results on the MuJoCo suite demonstrate a high performance gain for our algorithm compared to prior work, including Soft-Actor Critic (SAC).

2019-09-17

ArXiv (prépublication)

openreview.net

Combined Reinforcement Learning via Abstract Representations

Vincent Francois-Lavet

Yoshua Bengio

Doina Precup

In the quest for efficient and robust reinforcement learning methods, both model-free and model-based approaches offer advantages. In this p… (voir plus)aper we propose a new way of explicitly bridging both approaches via a shared low-dimensional learned encoding of the environment, meant to capture summarizing abstractions. We show that the modularity brought by this approach leads to good generalization while being computationally efficient, with planning happening in a smaller latent state space. In addition, this approach recovers a sufficient low-dimensional representation of the environment, which opens up new strategies for interpretable AI, exploration and transfer learning.

2019-07-17

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publié)

Online Adaptative Curriculum Learning for GANs

Thang Doan

Joao Monteiro

Isabela Albuquerque

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can successfully approximate a probability distribution and produce realistic samples. However, open … (voir plus)questions such as sufficient convergence conditions and mode collapse still persist. In this paper, we build on existing work in the area by proposing a novel framework for training the generator against an ensemble of discriminator networks, which can be seen as a one-student/multiple-teachers setting. We formalize this problem within the full-information adversarial bandit framework, where we evaluate the capability of an algorithm to select mixtures of discriminators for providing the generator with feedback during learning. To this end, we propose a reward function which reflects the progress made by the generator and dynamically update the mixture weights allocated to each discriminator. We also draw connections between our algorithm and stochastic optimization methods and then show that existing approaches using multiple discriminators in literature can be recovered from our framework. We argue that less expressive discriminators are smoother and have a general coarse grained view of the modes map, which enforces the generator to cover a wide portion of the data distribution support. On the other hand, highly expressive discriminators ensure samples quality. Finally, experimental results show that our approach improves samples quality and diversity over existing baselines by effectively learning a curriculum. These results also support the claim that weaker discriminators have higher entropy improving modes coverage.

2019-07-17

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publié)