Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a highly versatile and widely used clinical imaging tool. The content of MRI images is controlled by an acquisition sequence, which coordinates the timing and magnitude of the scanner hardware activations, which shape and coordinate the magnetisation within the body, allowing a coherent signal to be produced. The use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to control this process, and determine new and efficient acquisition strategies in MRI, has not been explored. Here, we take a first step into this area, by using DRL to control a virtual MRI scanner, and framing the problem as a game that aims to efficiently reconstruct the shape of an imaging phantom using partially reconstructed magnitude images. Our findings demonstrate that DRL successfully completed two key tasks: inducing the virtual MRI scanner to generate useful signals and interpreting those signals to determine the phantom's shape. This proof-of-concept study highlights the potential of DRL in autonomous MRI data acquisition, shedding light on the suitability of DRL for complex tasks, with limited supervision, and without the need to provide human-readable outputs.
Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely believed to have the potential to improve sample efficiency by allowing an agent to synthesize large amounts of imagined experience. Experience Replay (ER) can be considered a simple kind of model, which has proved effective at improving the stability and efficiency of deep RL. In principle, a learned parametric model could improve on ER by generalizing from real experience to augment the dataset with additional plausible experience. However, given that learned value functions can also generalize, it is not immediately obvious why model generalization should be better. Here, we provide theoretical and empirical insight into when, and how, we can expect data generated by a learned model to be useful. First, we provide a simple theorem motivating how learning a model as an intermediate step can narrow down the set of possible value functions more than learning a value function directly from data using the Bellman equation. Second, we provide an illustrative example showing empirically how a similar effect occurs in a more concrete setting with neural network function approximation. Finally, we provide extensive experiments showing the benefit of model-based learning for online RL in environments with combinatorial complexity, but factored structure that allows a learned model to generalize. In these experiments, we take care to control for other factors in order to isolate, insofar as possible, the benefit of using experience generated by a learned model relative to ER alone.
In this work, we propose a self-improving artificial intelligence system to enhance the safety performance of reinforcement learning (RL)-based autonomous driving (AD) agents using black-box verification methods. RL algorithms have become popular in AD applications in recent years. However, the performance of existing RL algorithms heavily depends on the diversity of training scenarios. A lack of safety-critical scenarios during the training phase could result in poor generalization performance in real-world driving applications. We propose a novel framework in which the weaknesses of the training set are explored through black-box verification methods. After discovering AD failure scenarios, the RL agent's training is re-initiated via transfer learning to improve the performance of previously unsafe scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach efficiently discovers safety failures of action decisions in RL-based adaptive cruise control (ACC) applications and significantly reduces the number of vehicle collisions through iterative applications of our method. The source code is publicly available at //github.com/data-and-decision-lab/self-improving-RL.
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A promising approach for alleviating these limitations is to cast the development of better RL algorithms as a machine learning problem itself in a process called meta-RL. Meta-RL is most commonly studied in a problem setting where, given a distribution of tasks, the goal is to learn a policy that is capable of adapting to any new task from the task distribution with as little data as possible. In this survey, we describe the meta-RL problem setting in detail as well as its major variations. We discuss how, at a high level, meta-RL research can be clustered based on the presence of a task distribution and the learning budget available for each individual task. Using these clusters, we then survey meta-RL algorithms and applications. We conclude by presenting the open problems on the path to making meta-RL part of the standard toolbox for a deep RL practitioner.
The past few years have seen rapid progress in combining reinforcement learning (RL) with deep learning. Various breakthroughs ranging from games to robotics have spurred the interest in designing sophisticated RL algorithms and systems. However, the prevailing workflow in RL is to learn tabula rasa, which may incur computational inefficiency. This precludes continuous deployment of RL algorithms and potentially excludes researchers without large-scale computing resources. In many other areas of machine learning, the pretraining paradigm has shown to be effective in acquiring transferable knowledge, which can be utilized for a variety of downstream tasks. Recently, we saw a surge of interest in Pretraining for Deep RL with promising results. However, much of the research has been based on different experimental settings. Due to the nature of RL, pretraining in this field is faced with unique challenges and hence requires new design principles. In this survey, we seek to systematically review existing works in pretraining for deep reinforcement learning, provide a taxonomy of these methods, discuss each sub-field, and bring attention to open problems and future directions.
Inspired by the human cognitive system, attention is a mechanism that imitates the human cognitive awareness about specific information, amplifying critical details to focus more on the essential aspects of data. Deep learning has employed attention to boost performance for many applications. Interestingly, the same attention design can suit processing different data modalities and can easily be incorporated into large networks. Furthermore, multiple complementary attention mechanisms can be incorporated in one network. Hence, attention techniques have become extremely attractive. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey specific to attention techniques to guide researchers in employing attention in their deep models. Note that, besides being demanding in terms of training data and computational resources, transformers only cover a single category in self-attention out of the many categories available. We fill this gap and provide an in-depth survey of 50 attention techniques categorizing them by their most prominent features. We initiate our discussion by introducing the fundamental concepts behind the success of attention mechanism. Next, we furnish some essentials such as the strengths and limitations of each attention category, describe their fundamental building blocks, basic formulations with primary usage, and applications specifically for computer vision. We also discuss the challenges and open questions related to attention mechanism in general. Finally, we recommend possible future research directions for deep attention.
Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic. It often surpasses traditional recommendation models even most deep learning-based methods, owing to its interactive nature and autonomous learning ability. Nevertheless, there are various challenges of RL when applying in recommender systems. Toward this end, we firstly provide a thorough overview, comparisons, and summarization of RL approaches for five typical recommendation scenarios, following three main categories of RL: value-function, policy search, and Actor-Critic. Then, we systematically analyze the challenges and relevant solutions on the basis of existing literature. Finally, under discussion for open issues of RL and its limitations of recommendation, we highlight some potential research directions in this field.
In light of the emergence of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in recommender systems research and several fruitful results in recent years, this survey aims to provide a timely and comprehensive overview of the recent trends of deep reinforcement learning in recommender systems. We start with the motivation of applying DRL in recommender systems. Then, we provide a taxonomy of current DRL-based recommender systems and a summary of existing methods. We discuss emerging topics and open issues, and provide our perspective on advancing the domain. This survey serves as introductory material for readers from academia and industry into the topic and identifies notable opportunities for further research.
This paper surveys the field of transfer learning in the problem setting of Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL has been the key solution to sequential decision-making problems. Along with the fast advance of RL in various domains. including robotics and game-playing, transfer learning arises as an important technique to assist RL by leveraging and transferring external expertise to boost the learning process. In this survey, we review the central issues of transfer learning in the RL domain, providing a systematic categorization of its state-of-the-art techniques. We analyze their goals, methodologies, applications, and the RL frameworks under which these transfer learning techniques would be approachable. We discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other relevant topics from an RL perspective and also explore the potential challenges as well as future development directions for transfer learning in RL.
Recently, deep multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) has become a highly active research area as many real-world problems can be inherently viewed as multiagent systems. A particularly interesting and widely applicable class of problems is the partially observable cooperative multiagent setting, in which a team of agents learns to coordinate their behaviors conditioning on their private observations and commonly shared global reward signals. One natural solution is to resort to the centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm. During centralized training, one key challenge is the multiagent credit assignment: how to allocate the global rewards for individual agent policies for better coordination towards maximizing system-level's benefits. In this paper, we propose a new method called Q-value Path Decomposition (QPD) to decompose the system's global Q-values into individual agents' Q-values. Unlike previous works which restrict the representation relation of the individual Q-values and the global one, we leverage the integrated gradient attribution technique into deep MARL to directly decompose global Q-values along trajectory paths to assign credits for agents. We evaluate QPD on the challenging StarCraft II micromanagement tasks and show that QPD achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous multiagent scenarios compared with existing cooperative MARL algorithms.
This paper presents a new multi-objective deep reinforcement learning (MODRL) framework based on deep Q-networks. We propose the use of linear and non-linear methods to develop the MODRL framework that includes both single-policy and multi-policy strategies. The experimental results on two benchmark problems including the two-objective deep sea treasure environment and the three-objective mountain car problem indicate that the proposed framework is able to converge to the optimal Pareto solutions effectively. The proposed framework is generic, which allows implementation of different deep reinforcement learning algorithms in different complex environments. This therefore overcomes many difficulties involved with standard multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) methods existing in the current literature. The framework creates a platform as a testbed environment to develop methods for solving various problems associated with the current MORL. Details of the framework implementation can be referred to //www.deakin.edu.au/~thanhthi/drl.htm.