Using Unity to Help Solve Reinforcement Learning
Connor Brennan
Andrew Robert Williams
Omar G. Younis
Vedant Vyas
Daria Yasafova
Leveraging the depth and flexibility of XLand as well as the rapid prototyping features of the Unity engine, we present the United Unity Uni… (voir plus)verse — an open-source toolkit designed to accelerate the creation of innovative reinforcement learning environments. This toolkit includes a robust implementation of XLand 2.0 complemented by a user-friendly interface which allows users to modify the details of procedurally generated terrains and task rules with ease. Additionally, we provide a curated selection of terrains and rule sets, accompanied by implementations of reinforcement learning baselines to facilitate quick experimentation with novel architectural designs for adaptive agents. Furthermore, we illustrate how the United Unity Universe serves as a high-level language that enables researchers to develop diverse and endlessly variable 3D environments within a unified framework. This functionality establishes the United Unity Universe (U3) as an essential tool for advancing the field of reinforcement learning, especially in the development of adaptive and generalizable learning systems.
WorkArena++: Towards Compositional Planning and Reasoning-based Common Knowledge Work Tasks
Léo Boisvert
Megh Thakkar
Massimo Caccia
Thibault Le Sellier de Chezelles
Alexandre Lacoste
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to mimic human-like intelligence has led to a surge in LLM-based autonomous agents. Though recen… (voir plus)t LLMs seem capable of planning and reasoning given user instructions, their effectiveness in applying these capabilities for autonomous task solving remains underexplored. This is especially true in enterprise settings, where automated agents hold the promise of a high impact. To fill this gap, we propose WorkArena++, a novel benchmark consisting of 682 tasks corresponding to realistic workflows routinely performed by knowledge workers. WorkArena++ is designed to evaluate the planning, problem-solving, logical/arithmetic reasoning, retrieval, and contextual understanding abilities of web agents. Our empirical studies across state-of-the-art LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs), as well as human workers, reveal several challenges for such models to serve as useful assistants in the workplace. In addition to the benchmark, we provide a mechanism to effortlessly generate thousands of ground-truth observation/action traces, which can be used for fine-tuning existing models. Overall, we expect this work to serve as a useful resource to help the community progress toward capable autonomous agents. The benchmark can be found at https://github.com/ServiceNow/WorkArena/tree/workarena-plus-plus.
4+3 Phases of Compute-Optimal Neural Scaling Laws
Elliot Paquette
Lechao Xiao
Jeffrey Pennington
Action Gaps and Advantages in Continuous-Time Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Harley Wiltzer
Patrick Shafto
Yash Jhaveri
Adaptive Exploration for Data-Efficient General Value Function Evaluations
Arushi Jain
Josiah P. Hanna
General Value Functions (GVFs) (Sutton et al, 2011) are an established way to represent predictive knowledge in reinforcement learning. Each… (voir plus) GVF computes the expected return for a given policy, based on a unique pseudo-reward. Multiple GVFs can be estimated in parallel using off-policy learning from a single stream of data, often sourced from a fixed behavior policy or pre-collected dataset. This leaves an open question: how can behavior policy be chosen for data-efficient GVF learning? To address this gap, we propose GVFExplorer, which aims at learning a behavior policy that efficiently gathers data for evaluating multiple GVFs in parallel. This behavior policy selects actions in proportion to the total variance in the return across all GVFs, reducing the number of environmental interactions. To enable accurate variance estimation, we use a recently proposed temporal-difference-style variance estimator. We prove that each behavior policy update reduces the mean squared error in the summed predictions over all GVFs. We empirically demonstrate our method's performance in both tabular representations and nonlinear function approximation.
Amortizing intractable inference in diffusion models for vision, language, and control
Siddarth Venkatraman
Moksh J. Jain
Luca Scimeca
Minsu Kim
Marcin Sendera
Mohsin Hasan
Luke Rowe
Sarthak Mittal
Pablo Lemos
Alexandre Adam
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Nikolay Malkin
Diffusion models have emerged as effective distribution estimators in vision, language, and reinforcement learning, but their use as priors … (voir plus)in downstream tasks poses an intractable posterior inference problem. This paper studies amortized sampling of the posterior over data,
Any2Policy: Learning Visuomotor Policy with Any-Modality
Yichen Zhu
Zhicai Ou
Feifei Feng
Humans can communicate and observe media with different modalities, such as texts, sounds, and images. For robots to be more generalizable e… (voir plus)mbodied agents, they should be capable of following instructions and perceiving the world with adaptation to diverse modalities. Current robotic learning methodologies often focus on single-modal task specification and observation, thereby limiting their ability to process rich multi-modal information. Addressing this limitation, we present an end-to-end general-purpose multi-modal system named Any-to-Policy Embodied Agents. This system empowers robots to handle tasks using various modalities, whether in combinations like text-image, audio-image, text-point cloud, or in isolation. Our innovative approach involves training a versatile modality network that adapts to various inputs and connects with policy networks for effective control. Because of the lack of existing multi-modal robotics datasets for evaluation, we assembled a comprehensive real-world dataset encompassing 30 robotic tasks. Each task in this dataset is richly annotated across multiple modalities, providing a robust foundation for assessment. We conducted extensive validation of our proposed unified modality embodied agent using several simulation benchmarks, including Franka Kitchen, Meta-World, and Maniskill2, as well as in our real-world settings. Our experiments showcase the promising capability of building embodied agents that can adapt to diverse multi-modal in a unified framework.
Balancing Context Length and Mixing Times for Reinforcement Learning at Scale
Matthew D Riemer
Janarthanan Rajendran
Mila Janarthanan
É. Montréal
Cell ontology guided transcriptome foundation model
Xinyu Yuan
Zhihao Zhan
Zuobai Zhang
Manqi Zhou
Jianan Zhao
Boyu Han
Transcriptome foundation models (TFMs) hold great promises of deciphering the transcriptomic language that dictate diverse cell functions by… (voir plus) self-supervised learning on large-scale single-cell gene expression data, and ultimately unraveling the complex mechanisms of human diseases. However, current TFMs treat cells as independent samples and ignore the taxonomic relationships between cell types, which are available in cell ontology graphs. We argue that effectively leveraging this ontology information during the TFM pre-training can improve learning biologically meaningful gene co-expression patterns while preserving TFM as a general purpose foundation model for downstream zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. To this end, we present **s**ingle **c**ell, **Cell**-**o**ntology guided TFM (scCello). We introduce cell-type coherence loss and ontology alignment loss, which are minimized along with the masked gene expression prediction loss during the pre-training. The novel loss component guide scCello to learn the cell-type-specific representation and the structural relation between cell types from the cell ontology graph, respectively. We pre-trained scCello on 22 million cells from CellxGene database leveraging their cell-type labels mapped to the cell ontology graph from Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry. Our TFM demonstrates competitive generalization and transferability performance over the existing TFMs on biologically important tasks including identifying novel cell types of unseen cells, prediction of cell-type-specific marker genes, and cancer drug responses. Source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/scCello.
Code Repair with LLMs gives an Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff
Hao Tang
Keya Hu
Jin Peng Zhou
Si Cheng Zhong
Wei-Long Zheng
Kevin Ellis
Conformal Inverse Optimization
Bo Lin
Timothy Chan
Inverse optimization has been increasingly used to estimate unknown parameters in an optimization model based on decision data. We show that… (voir plus) such a point estimation is insufficient in a prescriptive setting where the estimated parameters are used to prescribe new decisions. The prescribed decisions may be low-quality and misaligned with human intuition and thus are unlikely to be adopted. To tackle this challenge, we propose conformal inverse optimization, which seeks to learn an uncertainty set for the unknown parameters and then solve a robust optimization model to prescribe new decisions. Under mild assumptions, we show that our method enjoys provable guarantees on solution quality, as evaluated using both the ground-truth parameters and the decision maker's perception of the unknown parameters. Our method demonstrates strong empirical performance compared to classic inverse optimization.
Density-based User Representation using Gaussian Process Regression for Multi-interest Personalized Retrieval
Haolun Wu
Ofer Meshi
Masrour Zoghi
Craig Boutilier
MARYAM KARIMZADEHGAN