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Kee-Eung Kim

Publications and source records attributed to Kee-Eung Kim.

31 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2022

LobsDICE: Offline Learning from Observation via Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation

We consider the problem of learning from observation (LfO), in which the agent aims to mimic the expert's behavior from the state-only demonstrations by experts. We additionally assume that the agent cannot interact with the environment but has access to the action-labeled transition data collected by some agents with unknown qualities. This offline setting for LfO is appealing in many real-world scenarios where the ground-truth expert actions are inaccessible and the arbitrary environment interactions are costly or risky. In this paper, we present LobsDICE, an offline LfO algorithm that learns to imitate the expert policy via optimization in the space of stationary distributions. Our algorithm solves a single convex minimization problem, which minimizes the divergence between the two state-transition distributions induced by the expert and the agent policy. Through an extensive set of offline LfO tasks, we show that LobsDICE outperforms strong baseline methods.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2022

PAC-Net: A Model Pruning Approach to Inductive Transfer Learning

Inductive transfer learning aims to learn from a small amount of training data for the target task by utilizing a pre-trained model from the source task. Most strategies that involve large-scale deep learning models adopt initialization with the pre-trained model and fine-tuning for the target task. However, when using over-parameterized models, we can often prune the model without sacrificing the accuracy of the source task. This motivates us to adopt model pruning for transfer learning with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose PAC-Net, a simple yet effective approach for transfer learning based on pruning. PAC-Net consists of three steps: Prune, Allocate, and Calibrate (PAC). The main idea behind these steps is to identify essential weights for the source task, fine-tune on the source task by updating the essential weights, and then calibrate on the target task by updating the remaining redundant weights. Under the various and extensive set of inductive transfer learning experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance by a large margin.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2022

COptiDICE: Offline Constrained Reinforcement Learning via Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation

We consider the offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the agent aims to compute a policy that maximizes expected return while satisfying given cost constraints, learning only from a pre-collected dataset. This problem setting is appealing in many real-world scenarios, where direct interaction with the environment is costly or risky, and where the resulting policy should comply with safety constraints. However, it is challenging to compute a policy that guarantees satisfying the cost constraints in the offline RL setting, since the off-policy evaluation inherently has an estimation error. In this paper, we present an offline constrained RL algorithm that optimizes the policy in the space of the stationary distribution. Our algorithm, COptiDICE, directly estimates the stationary distribution corrections of the optimal policy with respect to returns, while constraining the cost upper bound, with the goal of yielding a cost-conservative policy for actual constraint satisfaction. Experimental results show that COptiDICE attains better policies in terms of constraint satisfaction and return-maximization, outperforming baseline algorithms.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2021

Augment & Valuate : A Data Enhancement Pipeline for Data-Centric AI

Data scarcity and noise are important issues in industrial applications of machine learning. However, it is often challenging to devise a scalable and generalized approach to address the fundamental distributional and semantic properties of dataset with black box models. For this reason, data-centric approaches are crucial for the automation of machine learning operation pipeline. In order to serve as the basis for this automation, we suggest a domain-agnostic pipeline for refining the quality of data in image classification problems. This pipeline contains data valuation, cleansing, and augmentation. With an appropriate combination of these methods, we could achieve 84.711% test accuracy (ranked #6, Honorable Mention in the Most Innovative) in the Data-Centric AI competition only with the provided dataset.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2021

OptiDICE: Offline Policy Optimization via Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation

We consider the offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting where the agent aims to optimize the policy solely from the data without further environment interactions. In offline RL, the distributional shift becomes the primary source of difficulty, which arises from the deviation of the target policy being optimized from the behavior policy used for data collection. This typically causes overestimation of action values, which poses severe problems for model-free algorithms that use bootstrapping. To mitigate the problem, prior offline RL algorithms often used sophisticated techniques that encourage underestimation of action values, which introduces an additional set of hyperparameters that need to be tuned properly. In this paper, we present an offline RL algorithm that prevents overestimation in a more principled way. Our algorithm, OptiDICE, directly estimates the stationary distribution corrections of the optimal policy and does not rely on policy-gradients, unlike previous offline RL algorithms. Using an extensive set of benchmark datasets for offline RL, we show that OptiDICE performs competitively with the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2020

Variational Interaction Information Maximization for Cross-domain Disentanglement

Cross-domain disentanglement is the problem of learning representations partitioned into domain-invariant and domain-specific representations, which is a key to successful domain transfer or measuring semantic distance between two domains. Grounded in information theory, we cast the simultaneous learning of domain-invariant and domain-specific representations as a joint objective of multiple information constraints, which does not require adversarial training or gradient reversal layers. We derive a tractable bound of the objective and propose a generative model named Interaction Information Auto-Encoder (IIAE). Our approach reveals insights on the desirable representation for cross-domain disentanglement and its connection to Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). We demonstrate the validity of our model in the image-to-image translation and the cross-domain retrieval tasks. We further show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot sketch based image retrieval task, even without external knowledge. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/gr8joo/IIAE

cs.CV↗
arXiv2020

Policy Optimization Through Approximate Importance Sampling

Recent policy optimization approaches (Schulman et al., 2015a; 2017) have achieved substantial empirical successes by constructing new proxy optimization objectives. These proxy objectives allow stable and low variance policy learning, but require small policy updates to ensure that the proxy objective remains an accurate approximation of the target policy value. In this paper we derive an alternative objective that obtains the value of the target policy by applying importance sampling (IS). However, the basic importance sampled objective is not suitable for policy optimization, as it incurs too high variance in policy updates. We therefore introduce an approximation that allows us to directly trade-off the bias of approximation with the variance in policy updates. We show that our approximation unifies previously developed approaches and allows us to interpolate between them. We develop a practical algorithm by optimizing the introduced objective with proximal policy optimization techniques (Schulman et al., 2017). We also provide a theoretical analysis of the introduced policy optimization objective demonstrating bias-variance trade-off. We empirically demonstrate that the resulting algorithm improves upon state of the art on-policy policy optimization on continuous control benchmarks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2015

Information-Theoretic Bounded Rationality

Bounded rationality, that is, decision-making and planning under resource limitations, is widely regarded as an important open problem in artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, computational neuroscience and economics. This paper offers a consolidated presentation of a theory of bounded rationality based on information-theoretic ideas. We provide a conceptual justification for using the free energy functional as the objective function for characterizing bounded-rational decisions. This functional possesses three crucial properties: it controls the size of the solution space; it has Monte Carlo planners that are exact, yet bypass the need for exhaustive search; and it captures model uncertainty arising from lack of evidence or from interacting with other agents having unknown intentions. We discuss the single-step decision-making case, and show how to extend it to sequential decisions using equivalence transformations. This extension yields a very general class of decision problems that encompass classical decision rules (e.g. EXPECTIMAX and MINIMAX) as limit cases, as well as trust- and risk-sensitive planning.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2014

Learning to Cooperate via Policy Search

Cooperative games are those in which both agents share the same payoff structure. Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms, such as variants of Q-learning, have been applied to learning cooperative games, but they only apply when the game state is completely observable to both agents. Policy search methods are a reasonable alternative to value-based methods for partially observable environments. In this paper, we provide a gradient-based distributed policy-search method for cooperative games and compare the notion of local optimum to that of Nash equilibrium. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method experimentally in a small, partially observable simulated soccer domain.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2013

Solving POMDPs by Searching the Space of Finite Policies

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from a restricted set of policies, represented as finite state automata of a given size. This problem is also intractable, but we show that the complexity can be greatly reduced when the POMDP and/or policy are further constrained. We demonstrate good empirical results with a branch-and-bound method for finding globally optimal deterministic policies, and a gradient-ascent method for finding locally optimal stochastic policies.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2013

Learning Finite-State Controllers for Partially Observable Environments

Reactive (memoryless) policies are sufficient in completely observable Markov decision processes (MDPs), but some kind of memory is usually necessary for optimal control of a partially observable MDP. Policies with finite memory can be represented as finite-state automata. In this paper, we extend Baird and Moore's VAPS algorithm to the problem of learning general finite-state automata. Because it performs stochastic gradient descent, this algorithm can be shown to converge to a locally optimal finite-state controller. We provide the details of the algorithm and then consider the question of under what conditions stochastic gradient descent will outperform exact gradient descent. We conclude with empirical results comparing the performance of stochastic and exact gradient descent, and showing the ability of our algorithm to extract the useful information contained in the sequence of past observations to compensate for the lack of observability at each time-step.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2012

A Geometric Traversal Algorithm for Reward-Uncertain MDPs

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used in modeling decision making problems in stochastic environments. However, precise specification of the reward functions in MDPs is often very difficult. Recent approaches have focused on computing an optimal policy based on the minimax regret criterion for obtaining a robust policy under uncertainty in the reward function. One of the core tasks in computing the minimax regret policy is to obtain the set of all policies that can be optimal for some candidate reward function. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that exploits the geometric properties of the reward function associated with the policies. We also present an approximate version of the method for further speed up. We experimentally demonstrate that our algorithm improves the performance by orders of magnitude.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2001

Learning to Cooperate via Policy Search

Cooperative games are those in which both agents share the same payoff structure. Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms, such as variants of Q-learning, have been applied to learning cooperative games, but they only apply when the game state is completely observable to both agents. Policy search methods are a reasonable alternative to value-based methods for partially observable environments. In this paper, we provide a gradient-based distributed policy-search method for cooperative games and compare the notion of local optimum to that of Nash equilibrium. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method experimentally in a small, partially observable simulated soccer domain.

cs.LG↗