Generative Models for Decision Making
Lisa Lee
Roberta Raileanu
Yilun Du
Walter Talbott
Katherine Metcalf
Alexander T Toshev
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made significant advancements in recent years, particularly with the development of large langua… (voir plus)ge and diffusion models. These generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various tasks, such as text generation and image and audio synthesis. Concurrently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant strides in solving complex sequential decision-making problems with the help of external knowledge sources . However, there remains untapped potential in combining generative models with RL algorithms to tackle real-world challenges, particularly to improve sample efficiency of tabula rasa training by introducing priors from related domains such as visual question-answering, image captioning and image generation. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from the fields of generative AI and reinforcement learning to explore the latest advances, methodologies, and applications. By fostering collaborations between these two domains, we intend to unlock new opportunities for addressing complex problems that lie at the intersection of both fields.
Global AI Cultures
Rida Qadri
Arjun Subramonian
Sunipa Dev
Georgina Emma Born
Mary L. Gray
Jessica Quaye
Rachel Bergmann
Integrating Generative and Experimental Platforms or Biomolecular Design
Cheng-Hao Liu
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Jason Yim
Soojung Yang
Sidney Lisanza
Francesca-Zhoufan Li
Pranam Chatterjee
Tommi Jaakkola
Regina Barzilay
David Baker
Frances H. Arnold
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Fostering the Maturity of ML Applications for Climate Change
Shiva Madadkhani
Olivia Mendivil Ramos
Millie Chapman
Jesse Dunietz
Arthur Ouaknine
Machine learning and information theory concepts towards an AI Mathematician
Nikolay Malkin
The current state of the art in artificial intelligence is impressive, especially in terms of mastery of language, but not so much in terms … (voir plus)of mathematical reasoning. What could be missing? Can we learn something useful about that gap from how the brains of mathematicians go about their craft? This essay builds on the idea that current deep learning mostly succeeds at system 1 abilities—which correspond to our intuition and habitual behaviors—but still lacks something important regarding system 2 abilities—which include reasoning and robust uncertainty estimation. It takes an information-theoretical posture to ask questions about what constitutes an interesting mathematical statement, which could guide future work in crafting an AI mathematician. The focus is not on proving a given theorem but on discovering new and interesting conjectures. The central hypothesis is that a desirable body of theorems better summarizes the set of all provable statements, for example, by having a small description length while at the same time being close (in terms of number of derivation steps) to many provable statements.
Machine learning and information theory concepts towards an AI Mathematician
Nikolay Malkin
The current state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence is impressive, especially in terms of mastery of language, but not so much in terms … (voir plus)of mathematical reasoning. What could be missing? Can we learn something useful about that gap from how the brains of mathematicians go about their craft? This essay builds on the idea that current deep learning mostly succeeds at system 1 abilities -- which correspond to our intuition and habitual behaviors -- but still lacks something important regarding system 2 abilities -- which include reasoning and robust uncertainty estimation. It takes an information-theoretical posture to ask questions about what constitutes an interesting mathematical statement, which could guide future work in crafting an AI mathematician. The focus is not on proving a given theorem but on discovering new and interesting conjectures. The central hypothesis is that a desirable body of theorems better summarizes the set of all provable statements, for example by having a small description length while at the same time being close (in terms of number of derivation steps) to many provable statements.
Mastering Memory Tasks with World Models
Mohammad Reza Samsami
Artem Zholus
Janarthanan Rajendran
Current model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents struggle with long-term dependencies. This limits their ability to effectively solv… (voir plus)e tasks involving extended time gaps between actions and outcomes, or tasks demanding the recalling of distant observations to inform current actions. To improve temporal coherence, we integrate a new family of state space models (SSMs) in world models of MBRL agents to present a new method, Recall to Imagine (R2I). This integration aims to enhance both long-term memory and long-horizon credit assignment. Through a diverse set of illustrative tasks, we systematically demonstrate that R2I not only establishes a new state-of-the-art for challenging memory and credit assignment RL tasks, such as BSuite and POPGym, but also showcases superhuman performance in the complex memory domain of Memory Maze. At the same time, it upholds comparable performance in classic RL tasks, such as Atari and DMC, suggesting the generality of our method. We also show that R2I is faster than the state-of-the-art MBRL method, DreamerV3, resulting in faster wall-time convergence.
Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL
Jesse Farebrother
Jordi Orbay
Quan Vuong
Adrien Ali Taiga
Yevgen Chebotar
Ted Xiao
Alex Irpan
Sergey Levine
Aleksandra Faust
Aviral Kumar
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained … (voir plus)using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods that use regression to large networks, such as high-capacity Transformers, has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to supervised learning: by leveraging a cross-entropy classification loss, supervised methods have scaled reliably to massive networks. Observing this discrepancy, in this paper, we investigate whether the scalability of deep RL can also be improved simply by using classification in place of regression for training value functions. We demonstrate that value functions trained with categorical cross-entropy significantly improves performance and scalability in a variety of domains. These include: single-task RL on Atari 2600 games with SoftMoEs, multi-task RL on Atari with large-scale ResNets, robotic manipulation with Q-transformers, playing Chess without search, and a language-agent Wordle task with high-capacity Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results on these domains. Through careful analysis, we show that the benefits of categorical cross-entropy primarily stem from its ability to mitigate issues inherent to value-based RL, such as noisy targets and non-stationarity. Overall, we argue that a simple shift to training value functions with categorical cross-entropy can yield substantial improvements in the scalability of deep RL at little-to-no cost.
Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL
Jesse Farebrother
Jordi Orbay
Quan Vuong
Adrien Ali Taiga
Yevgen Chebotar
Ted Xiao
Alex Irpan
Sergey Levine
Aleksandra Faust
Aviral Kumar
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained … (voir plus)using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods that use regression to large networks, such as high-capacity Transformers, has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to supervised learning: by leveraging a cross-entropy classification loss, supervised methods have scaled reliably to massive networks. Observing this discrepancy, in this paper, we investigate whether the scalability of deep RL can also be improved simply by using classification in place of regression for training value functions. We demonstrate that value functions trained with categorical cross-entropy significantly improves performance and scalability in a variety of domains. These include: single-task RL on Atari 2600 games with SoftMoEs, multi-task RL on Atari with large-scale ResNets, robotic manipulation with Q-transformers, playing Chess without search, and a language-agent Wordle task with high-capacity Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results on these domains. Through careful analysis, we show that the benefits of categorical cross-entropy primarily stem from its ability to mitigate issues inherent to value-based RL, such as noisy targets and non-stationarity. Overall, we argue that a simple shift to training value functions with categorical cross-entropy can yield substantial improvements in the scalability of deep RL at little-to-no cost.
Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL
Jesse Farebrother
Jordi Orbay
Quan Ho Vuong
Adrien Ali Taiga
Yevgen Chebotar
Ted Xiao
A. Irpan
Sergey Levine
Aleksandra Faust
Aviral Kumar
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained … (voir plus)using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods that use regression to large networks, such as high-capacity Transformers, has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to supervised learning: by leveraging a cross-entropy classification loss, supervised methods have scaled reliably to massive networks. Observing this discrepancy, in this paper, we investigate whether the scalability of deep RL can also be improved simply by using classification in place of regression for training value functions. We demonstrate that value functions trained with categorical cross-entropy significantly improves performance and scalability in a variety of domains. These include: single-task RL on Atari 2600 games with SoftMoEs, multi-task RL on Atari with large-scale ResNets, robotic manipulation with Q-transformers, playing Chess without search, and a language-agent Wordle task with high-capacity Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results on these domains. Through careful analysis, we show that the benefits of categorical cross-entropy primarily stem from its ability to mitigate issues inherent to value-based RL, such as noisy targets and non-stationarity. Overall, we argue that a simple shift to training value functions with categorical cross-entropy can yield substantial improvements in the scalability of deep RL at little-to-no cost.
Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL
Jesse Farebrother
Jordi Orbay
Quan Vuong
Adrien Ali Taiga
Yevgen Chebotar
Ted Xiao
Alex Irpan
Sergey Levine
Aleksandra Faust
Aviral Kumar
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained … (voir plus)using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However, scaling value-based RL methods that use regression to large networks, such as high-capacity Transformers, has proven challenging. This difficulty is in stark contrast to supervised learning: by leveraging a cross-entropy classification loss, supervised methods have scaled reliably to massive networks. Observing this discrepancy, in this paper, we investigate whether the scalability of deep RL can also be improved simply by using classification in place of regression for training value functions. We demonstrate that value functions trained with categorical cross-entropy significantly improves performance and scalability in a variety of domains. These include: single-task RL on Atari 2600 games with SoftMoEs, multi-task RL on Atari with large-scale ResNets, robotic manipulation with Q-transformers, playing Chess without search, and a language-agent Wordle task with high-capacity Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art results on these domains. Through careful analysis, we show that the benefits of categorical cross-entropy primarily stem from its ability to mitigate issues inherent to value-based RL, such as noisy targets and non-stationarity. Overall, we argue that a simple shift to training value functions with categorical cross-entropy can yield substantial improvements in the scalability of deep RL at little-to-no cost.
Efficient Causal Graph Discovery Using Large Language Models
Thomas Jiralerspong
Xiaoyin Chen
Yash More
Vedant Shah