AI Technology & Industry Review
In the new paper Human-level Atari 200x Faster, a DeepMind research team applies a set of diverse strategies to Agent57, with their resulting MEME (Efficient Memory-based Exploration) agent surpassing the human baseline on all 57 Atari games in just 390 million frames — two orders of magnitude faster than Agent57.
The new DeepMind paper Data Augmentation for Efficient Learning from Parametric Experts proposes Augmented Policy Cloning (APC), a simple yet effective data-augmentation approach designed to support data-efficient learning from parametric experts. The method significantly improves data efficiency across various control and reinforcement learning settings.
In the new paper MO2: Model-Based Offline Options, a DeepMind research team introduces Model-Based Offline Options (MO2), an offline hindsight bottleneck options framework that supports sample-efficient option discovery over continuous state-action spaces for efficient skill transfer to new tasks.
In the new paper Planning in Stochastic Environments with a Learned Model, a research team from DeepMind and University College London extends the deterministic MuZero model to Stochastic MuZero for stochastic model learning, achieving performance comparable or superior to state-of-the-art methods in complex single- and multi-agent environments.
In the new paper DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley leverage recent advances in the Dreamer world model to enable online reinforcement learning for robot training without simulators or demonstrations, establishing a strong baseline for efficient real-world robotic learning.
In the new paper Large-Scale Retrieval for Reinforcement Learning, a DeepMind research team dramatically expands the information accessible to reinforcement learning (RL) agents, enabling them to attend to tens of millions of information pieces, incorporate new information without retraining, and learn decision making in an end-to-end manner.
In the new paper Factory: Fast Contact for Robotic Assembly, a research team from NVIDIA and the University of Washington introduces Factory, a set of physics simulation methods and robot learning tools for simulating contact-rich interactions in assembly with high accuracy, efficiency, and robustness.
In the new paper Rethinking Reinforcement Learning Based Logic Synthesis, a research team from Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab develops a novel reinforcement learning-based logic synthesis method to automatically recognize critical operators and produce common operator sequences that are generalizable to unseen circuits.
In the new paper AutoDIME: Automatic Design of Interesting Multi-Agent Environments, an OpenAI research team explores automatic environment design for multi-agent environments using an RL-trained teacher that samples environments to maximize student learning. The work demonstrates that intrinsic teacher rewards are a promising approach for automating both single and multi-agent environment design.
DeepMind trains agents to use keyboard and mouse commands with pixel and Document Object Model (DOM) observations to control computers, achieving state-of-the-art and human-level mean performance across all tasks on the MiniWob++ benchmark.
A research team from DeepMind and University College London proposes Neural Population Learning (NeuPL), an efficient and general framework that learns and represents diverse policies in symmetric zero-sum games within a single conditional network.
An OpenAI research team leverages reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to make significant progress on aligning language models with the users’ intentions. The proposed InstructGPT models are better at following instructions than GPT-3 while also more truthful and less toxic.
A research team from the University of California Irvine and DeepMind proposes Anytime Optimal PSRO, a new PSRO variant for two-player zero-sum games that is guaranteed to converge to a Nash equilibrium while decreasing exploitability from iteration to iteration.
DeepMind researchers introduce Player of Games (PoG), a general-purpose algorithm that applies self-play learning, search, and game-theoretic reasoning to perfect and imperfect information games, taking an important step toward truly general algorithms for arbitrary environments.
In the new paper Understanding the World Through Action, UC Berkeley assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences Sergey Levine argues that a general, principled, and powerful framework for utilizing unlabelled data can be derived from reinforcement learning to enable machine learning systems leveraging large datasets to understand the real world.
DeepMind and Google Brain researchers and former World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik explore how human knowledge is acquired and how chess concepts are represented in the AlphaZero neural network via concept probing, behavioural analysis, and an examination of its activations.
A Facebook AI research team releases SaLinA, a reinforcement learning (RL) library for model-based RL, differentiable environments and multi-agent RL that simplifies the implementation of complex sequential learning models.
A DeepMind research team explores the problem of how to train agents to collaborate well with novel human partners without using human data and presents Fictitious Co-Play (FCP), a surprisingly simple approach designed to address this challenge.
In the paper Introducing Symmetries to Black Box Meta Reinforcement Learning, a research team from DeepMind and The Swiss AI Lab IDSIA explores the role of symmetries in meta generalization and shows that introducing more symmetries to black-box meta-learners can improve their ability to generalize to unseen action and observation spaces, tasks, and environments.
A research team from Carnegie Mellon University, Google Brain and UC Berkeley proposes a robust predictable control (RPC) method for learning reinforcement learning policies that use fewer bits of information. This simple and theoretically-justified algorithm achieves much tighter compression, is more robust, and generalizes better than prior methods, achieving up to 5× higher rewards than a standard information bottleneck.
Researchers from Robotics at Google propose reformulating behavioural cloning using implicit models and show that this simple change can lead to remarkable improvements in performance across a wide range of contact-rich robot policy learning.
In the paper ReGen: Reinforcement Learning for Text and Knowledge Base Generation Using Pretrained Language Models, IBM researchers present ReGen, a bidirectional generation of text and graph that leverages reinforcement learning to push the performance of text-to-graph and graph-to-text generation tasks to a higher level.
A research team from Stanford University introduces BEHAVIOR, a benchmark for embodied AI with 100 realistic, diverse and complex everyday household activities in simulation. BEHAVIOR addresses challenges such as definition, instantiation in a simulator, and evaluation; and pushes the state-of-the-art by adding new types of state changes.
A DeepMind research team proposes Collect and Infer, a novel paradigm that explicitly models Reinforcement Learning (RL) as data collection and knowledge inference to dramatically boost RL data efficiency.
A research team from the University of California, Princeton University and ETH Zurich proposes RLQP, an accelerated QP solver based on operator-splitting QP (OSQP) that uses deep reinforcement learning (RL) to speed up the solver’s convergence rate.
A research team from DeepMind and Amii extends the emphatic method to multi-step deep reinforcement learning (RL) targets, and demonstrates that combining emphatic trace with deep neural networks can improve performance on classic Atari video games.
A research team from Mila, McGill University, Université de Montréal, DeepMind and Microsoft proposes GFlowNet, a novel flow network-based generative method that can turn a given positive reward into a generative policy that samples with a probability proportional to the return.v
A research team from McGill University, Université de Montréal, DeepMind and Mila presents an end-to-end, model-based deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent that dynamically attends to relevant parts of its environments to facilitate out-of-distribution (OOD) and systematic generalization.
A research team from UC Berkeley, Facebook AI Research and Google Brain abstracts Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a sequence modelling problem. Their proposed Decision Transformer simply outputs optimal actions by leveraging a causally masked transformer, yet matches or exceeds state-of-the-art model-free offline RL baselines on Atari, OpenAI Gym, and Key-to-Door tasks.
A research team from Google Brain conducts a comprehensive empirical study on more than fifty choices in a generic adversarial imitation learning framework and explores their impacts on large-scale (>500k trained agents) continuous-control tasks to provide practical insights and recommendations for designing novel and effective AIL algorithms.
A research team from the University of Montreal and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems constructs a reinforcement learning agent whose knowledge and reward function can be reused across tasks, along with an attention mechanism that dynamically selects unchangeable knowledge pieces to enable out-of-distribution adaptation and generalization.
A research team from MIT and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab proposes Curious Representation Learning (CRL), a framework that learns to understand the surrounding environment by training a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to maximize the error of a representation learner to gain an incentive to explore the environment.
A research team from UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University proposes a task-agnostic reinforcement learning method that reduces the task-specific engineering required for domain randomization of both visual and dynamics parameters.
A research team from DeepMind introduces Anakin and Sebulba, two architectures that demonstrate reinforcement learning platforms based on TPUs can efficiently deliver exceptional performance at scale and with low cost.
Stanford researchers’ DERL (Deep Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning) is a novel computational framework that enables AI agents to evolve morphologies and learn challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks in complex environments using only low level egocentric sensory information.
A research team from DeepMind and University College London have released Alchemy, a novel open-source benchmark for meta-RL research.
Researchers from Vector Institute, University of Toronto and Google Brain recently studied three common types of intrinsic motivation across seven agents, three Atari games, and the 3D game Minecraft.
This year, 22 Transformer-related research papers were accepted by NeurIPS, the world’s most prestigious machine learning conference. Synced has selected ten of these works to showcase the latest Transformer trends.
A new DeepMind scalable environment simulator takes a digital approach to the question, enabling the examination of environmental factors on AI agents.
A new study proposes using human feedback and interaction logs to boost offline reinforcement learning (RL) in natural language processing (NLP).