arXiv subjects

Gabriel Dulac-Arnold

Publications and source records attributed to Gabriel Dulac-Arnold.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

The Predictron: End-To-End Learning and Planning

One of the key challenges of artificial intelligence is to learn models that are effective in the context of planning. In this document we introduce the predictron architecture. The predictron consists of a fully abstract model, represented by a Markov reward process, that can be rolled forward multiple "imagined" planning steps. Each forward pass of the predictron accumulates internal rewards and values over multiple planning depths. The predictron is trained end-to-end so as to make these accumulated values accurately approximate the true value function. We applied the predictron to procedurally generated random mazes and a simulator for the game of pool. The predictron yielded significantly more accurate predictions than conventional deep neural network architectures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Deep Reinforcement Learning in Large Discrete Action Spaces

Being able to reason in an environment with a large number of discrete actions is essential to bringing reinforcement learning to a larger class of problems. Recommender systems, industrial plants and language models are only some of the many real-world tasks involving large numbers of discrete actions for which current methods are difficult or even often impossible to apply. An ability to generalize over the set of actions as well as sub-linear complexity relative to the size of the set are both necessary to handle such tasks. Current approaches are not able to provide both of these, which motivates the work in this paper. Our proposed approach leverages prior information about the actions to embed them in a continuous space upon which it can generalize. Additionally, approximate nearest-neighbor methods allow for logarithmic-time lookup complexity relative to the number of actions, which is necessary for time-wise tractable training. This combined approach allows reinforcement learning methods to be applied to large-scale learning problems previously intractable with current methods. We demonstrate our algorithm's abilities on a series of tasks having up to one million actions.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2015

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Attention for Slate Markov Decision Processes with High-Dimensional States and Actions

Many real-world problems come with action spaces represented as feature vectors. Although high-dimensional control is a largely unsolved problem, there has recently been progress for modest dimensionalities. Here we report on a successful attempt at addressing problems of dimensionality as high as $2000$, of a particular form. Motivated by important applications such as recommendation systems that do not fit the standard reinforcement learning frameworks, we introduce Slate Markov Decision Processes (slate-MDPs). A Slate-MDP is an MDP with a combinatorial action space consisting of slates (tuples) of primitive actions of which one is executed in an underlying MDP. The agent does not control the choice of this executed action and the action might not even be from the slate, e.g., for recommendation systems for which all recommendations can be ignored. We use deep Q-learning based on feature representations of both the state and action to learn the value of whole slates. Unlike existing methods, we optimize for both the combinatorial and sequential aspects of our tasks. The new agent's superiority over agents that either ignore the combinatorial or sequential long-term value aspect is demonstrated on a range of environments with dynamics from a real-world recommendation system. Further, we use deep deterministic policy gradients to learn a policy that for each position of the slate, guides attention towards the part of the action space in which the value is the highest and we only evaluate actions in this area. The attention is used within a sequentially greedy procedure leveraging submodularity. Finally, we show how introducing risk-seeking can dramatically improve the agents performance and ability to discover more far reaching strategies.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2014

Sequentially Generated Instance-Dependent Image Representations for Classification

In this paper, we investigate a new framework for image classification that adaptively generates spatial representations. Our strategy is based on a sequential process that learns to explore the different regions of any image in order to infer its category. In particular, the choice of regions is specific to each image, directed by the actual content of previously selected regions.The capacity of the system to handle incomplete image information as well as its adaptive region selection allow the system to perform well in budgeted classification tasks by exploiting a dynamicly generated representation of each image. We demonstrate the system's abilities in a series of image-based exploration and classification tasks that highlight its learned exploration and inference abilities.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2012

Fast Reinforcement Learning with Large Action Sets using Error-Correcting Output Codes for MDP Factorization

The use of Reinforcement Learning in real-world scenarios is strongly limited by issues of scale. Most RL learning algorithms are unable to deal with problems composed of hundreds or sometimes even dozens of possible actions, and therefore cannot be applied to many real-world problems. We consider the RL problem in the supervised classification framework where the optimal policy is obtained through a multiclass classifier, the set of classes being the set of actions of the problem. We introduce error-correcting output codes (ECOCs) in this setting and propose two new methods for reducing complexity when using rollouts-based approaches. The first method consists in using an ECOC-based classifier as the multiclass classifier, reducing the learning complexity from O(A2) to O(Alog(A)). We then propose a novel method that profits from the ECOC's coding dictionary to split the initial MDP into O(log(A)) seperate two-action MDPs. This second method reduces learning complexity even further, from O(A2) to O(log(A)), thus rendering problems with large action sets tractable. We finish by experimentally demonstrating the advantages of our approach on a set of benchmark problems, both in speed and performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2011

Text Classification: A Sequential Reading Approach

We propose to model the text classification process as a sequential decision process. In this process, an agent learns to classify documents into topics while reading the document sentences sequentially and learns to stop as soon as enough information was read for deciding. The proposed algorithm is based on a modelisation of Text Classification as a Markov Decision Process and learns by using Reinforcement Learning. Experiments on four different classical mono-label corpora show that the proposed approach performs comparably to classical SVM approaches for large training sets, and better for small training sets. In addition, the model automatically adapts its reading process to the quantity of training information provided.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2011

Datum-Wise Classification: A Sequential Approach to Sparsity

We propose a novel classification technique whose aim is to select an appropriate representation for each datapoint, in contrast to the usual approach of selecting a representation encompassing the whole dataset. This datum-wise representation is found by using a sparsity inducing empirical risk, which is a relaxation of the standard L 0 regularized risk. The classification problem is modeled as a sequential decision process that sequentially chooses, for each datapoint, which features to use before classifying. Datum-Wise Classification extends naturally to multi-class tasks, and we describe a specific case where our inference has equivalent complexity to a traditional linear classifier, while still using a variable number of features. We compare our classifier to classical L 1 regularized linear models (L 1-SVM and LARS) on a set of common binary and multi-class datasets and show that for an equal average number of features used we can get improved performance using our method.

cs.AI↗