The UCB algorithm for bandits comes back again as UCT to form the basis for model estimation via MCTS

Tree search makes this tradeoff very clear, how many paths will you explore before you stop and use the knowledge you already have?

The summary paper for AlphaGo.

Wikipedia: AlphaZero

2024 paper arguing that other methods beyond PPO could be better for "value alignment" of LLMs

Paper "Deep Reinforcement Learning that Matters" on evaluating RL algorithms.

T. Herlau, "Moral Reinforcement Learning Using Actual Causation," 2022 2nd International Conference on Computer, Control and Robotics (ICCCR), Shanghai, China, 2022, pp. 179-185, doi: 10.1109/ICCCR54399.2022.9790262. keywords: {Digital control;Ethics;Costs;Philosophical considerations;Toy manufacturing industry;Reinforcement learning;Forestry;Causality;Reinforcement learning;Actual Causation;Ethical reinforcement learning}

Reading this one on Nov 27, 2023 for the reading group.

Reading this one on Nov 27, 2023 for the reading group.

(Chen, NeurIPS, 2021) Che1, Lu, Rajeswaran, Lee, Grover, Laskin, Abbeel, Srinivas, and Mordatch. "Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling". Arxiv preprint rXiv:2106.01345v2, June, 2021.

Quickly a very influential paper with a new idea of how to learn generative models of action prediction using SARSA training from demonstration trajectories. No optimization of actions or rewards, but target reward is an input.

Wu, Prabhumoye, Yeon Min, Bisk, Salakhutdinov, Azaria, Mitchell and Li. "SPRING: GPT-4 Out-performs RL Algorithms byStudying Papers and Reasoning". Arxiv preprint arXiv:2305.15486v2, May, 2023.

Them's fighten' words!

I haven't read it yet, but we're putting it on the list for this fall's reading group. Seriously, a strong result with a very strong implied claim. they are careful to say it's from their empirical results, very worth a look. I suspect that amount of implicit knowledge in the papers, text and DAG are helping to do this.

The Big Question: is their comparison to RL baselines fair, are they being trained from scratch? What does a fair comparison of any from-scratch model (RL or supervised) mean when compared to an LLM approach (or any approach using a foundation model), when that model is not really from scratch.

Original Paper for discussion of the Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback algorithm.

[Kapturowski, DeepMind, Sep 2022] "Human-level Atari 200x Faster"

Improving the 2020 Agent57 performance to be more efficeint.

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07550

Adaptive Stress Testing with Reward Augmentation for Autonomous Vehicle Validation

(Espeholt, ICML, 2018) "IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures"

This paper introduced the DPG Algorithm

Link to page with information about the paper: https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJeXCo0cYX

Yann LeCun released his vision for the future of Artificial Intelligence research in 2022, and it sounds a lot like Reinforcement Learning.

The paper that introduced the DQN algorithm for using Deep Learning with Reinforcement Learning to play Atari game.

Paper that evaluated the existing Double Q-Learning algorithm on the new DQN approach and validated that it is very effective in the Deep RL realm.

This paper introduces the DDPG algorithm which builds on the existing DPG algorithm from classic RL theory. The main idea is to define a deterministic policy, or nearly deterministic, for situations where the environment is very sensitive to suboptimal actions, and one action setting usually dominates in each state. This showed good performance, but could not beat algorithms such as PPO until the additions of SAC were added. SAC adds an entropy penalty which essentially penalizes uncertainty in any states. Using this, the deterministic policy gradient approach performs well.

This famous paper gives a great review of the DQN algorithm a couple years after it changed everything in Deep RL. It compares six different extensions to DQN for Deep Reinforcement Learning, many of which have now become standard additions to DQN and other Deep RL algorithms. It also combines all of them together to produce the "rainbow" algorithm, which outperformed many other models for a while.

Arxiv paper from 2021 on reinforcement learning in a scenario where your aim is to learn a workable POMDP policy, but you start with a fully observable MDP and adjust it over time towards a POMDP.

Paper that introduced the PPO algorithm. PPO is, in a way, a response to the TRPO algorithm, trying to use the core idea but implement a more efficient and simpler algorithm.

TRPO defines the problem as a straight optimization problem, no learning is actually involved.

Bowen Baker et. al. (Open AI) "Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos" Arkiv, June 2022.

Introduction of VPT : New semi-supervied pre-trained model for sequential decision making on Minecraft. Data are from human video playthroughs but are unlabelled.

Liang, Machado, Talvite, Bowling - AAMAS 2016 "State of the Art Control of Atari Games Using Shallow Reinforcement Learning"

Response paper to DQN showing that well designed Value Function Approximations can also do well at these complex tasks without the use of Deep Learning

A great paper showing how to think differently about the latest advances in Deep RL. All is not always what it seems!

Tom Schaul, John Quan, Ioannis Antonoglou and David Silver. "PRIORITIZED EXPERIENCE REPLAY", ICLR, 2016.

Liang, Machado, Talvite, Bowling - AAMAS 2016 "State of the Art Control of Atari Games Using Shallow Reinforcement Learning"

A great paper showing how to think differently about the latest advances in Deep RL. All is not always what it seems!

LeBlanc, D. G., & Lee, G. (2021). General Deep Reinforcement Learning in NES Games. Canadian AI 2021. Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). https://doi.org/10.21428/594757db.8472938b

Bowen Baker et. al. (Open AI) "Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos" Arkiv, June 2022.

New supervised pre-trained model for sequential decision making on Minecraft. Data are from human video playthroughs but are unlabelled.

reinforcement-learning foundation-models pretrained-models proj-minerl minecraft

Things missing in a prompt will not result from a prompt. This may reinforce one's own blind spots / omissions, lowering the probability of an intuitive leap to other possibilities. The machine helps you search under the light you switched on with your prompt. Regardless of whether you're searching in the right place.

They demonstrate the model on a "minecraft-like" domain (introduced earlier by someone else) where there are resources in the world and the agent has tasks.

The MDP does not change, it's dynamics are the same, with or without the RM, as they are with or without a standard reward model. Additionally, the rewards from the RM can be non-Markovian with respect to the MDP because they inherently have a kind of memory or where you've been, limited to the agents "movement" (almost "in it's mind") about where it is along the goals for this task.

So by specifying a reward machine you are augmenting the state space of the MDP with higher level goals/subgoals/concepts that provide structure about what is good and what isn't.

Fascinating idea, why not? Why are we hiding the reward from the agent really?

[Icarte, JAIR, 2022] "Reward Machines: Exploiting Reward Function Structure in Reinforcement Learning"

[Icarte, PMLR, 2018] "Using Reward Machines for High-Level Task Specification and Decomposition in Reinforcement Learning"

Lee et. al. - NeurIPS 2022 "Multi-Game Decision Transformers"

[Neumann, Gros, NeurIPS, 2022] - "SCALING LAWS FOR A MULTI-AGENT REINFORCEMENT LEARNING MODEL"

AAAI 2022 Paper : Decentralized Mean Field Games Happy to discuss online.

S. Ganapathi Subramanian, M. Taylor, M. Crowley, and P. Poupart., “Decentralized mean field games,” in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2022), vol. 36, pp. 9439–9447, February 2022. 1.

A recent overview of RL methods used for autonomous driving.

Discussion on

Bellinger C, Drozdyuk A, Crowley M, Tamblyn I. Balancing Information with Observation Costs in Deep Reinforcement Learning. Proceedings of the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence [Internet]. 2022 May 27; Available from: https://caiac.pubpub.org/pub/0jmy7gpd

Another piece to the "what can we do with eligibility traces" puzzle for Deep RL.

Question: What happened to Eligibility Traces in the Deep RL era? This paper highlights some of the reasons they are not used widely and proposes a way they could still be effective.

Question: What happened to Eligibility Traces in the Deep RL era? This paper highlights some of the reasons they are not used widely and proposes a way they could still be effective.

Hypothesis page to discuss this high level description of DeepMind's new Gato framework.

The paper that introduced the MineRL challenge dataset.

"Reinforcement means to the act of reinforcing."

Palminteri, S. (2021). Choice-confirmation bias and gradual perseveration in human reinforcement learning [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dpqj6

Chadi, M.-A., & Mousannif, H. (2021). Reinforcement Learning Based Decision Support Tool For Epidemic Control [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tcr8s

Same is true of reinforcement learning algorithms.

Ozaita, J., Baronchelli, A., & Sánchez, A. (2020). The emergence of segregation: From observable markers to group specific norms. ArXiv:2009.05354 [Physics, q-Bio]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.05354

Ludwig, V. U., Brown, K. W., & Brewer, J. A. (2020). Self-Regulation Without Force: Can Awareness Leverage Reward to Drive Behavior Change? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1745691620931460. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620931460

Harvey, A., Armstrong, C. C., Callaway, C. A., Gumport, N. B., & Gasperetti, C. E. (2020). COVID-19 Prevention via the Science of Habit Formation [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/57jyg

Radulescu, A., Holmes, K., & Niv, Y. (2020). On the convergent validity of risk sensitivity measures [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qdhx4

https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1255403798463471616

Hertz, U. (2020). Cognitive learning processes account for asymmetries in adaptations to new social norms [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7thku

Liu, L., Wang, X., Tang, S., & Zheng, Z. (2020). Complex social contagion induces bistability on multiplex networks. ArXiv:2005.00664 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2005.00664

Ting, C., Palminteri, S., Lebreton, M., & Engelmann, J. B. (2020, March 25). The elusive effects of incidental anxiety on reinforcement-learning. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7d4tc MLA

深度强化学习综述

深度强化学习综述

reinforcement-learning code and paper tutorials

Always feels good to say, "I worked out today!"