We study reward poisoning attacks on online deep reinforcement learning (DRL), where the attacker is oblivious to the learning algorithm used by the agent and the dynamics of the environment. We demonstrate the intrinsic vulnerability of state-of-the-art DRL algorithms by designing a general, black-box reward poisoning framework called adversarial MDP attacks. We instantiate our framework to construct two new attacks which only corrupt the rewards for a small fraction of the total training timesteps and make the agent learn a low-performing policy. We provide a theoretical analysis of the efficiency of our attack and perform an extensive empirical evaluation. Our results show that our attacks efficiently poison agents learning in several popular classical control and MuJoCo environments with a variety of state-of-the-art DRL algorithms, such as DQN, PPO, SAC, etc.
Bayesian inference for neural networks, or Bayesian deep learning, has the potential to provide well-calibrated predictions with quantified uncertainty and robustness. However, the main hurdle for Bayesian deep learning is its computational complexity due to the high dimensionality of the parameter space. In this work, we propose a novel scheme that addresses this limitation by constructing a low-dimensional subspace of the neural network parameters-referred to as an active subspace-by identifying the parameter directions that have the most significant influence on the output of the neural network. We demonstrate that the significantly reduced active subspace enables effective and scalable Bayesian inference via either Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods, otherwise computationally intractable, or variational inference. Empirically, our approach provides reliable predictions with robust uncertainty estimates for various regression tasks.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has proven extremely useful in a large variety of application domains. However, even successful DRL-based software can exhibit highly undesirable behavior. This is due to DRL training being based on maximizing a reward function, which typically captures general trends but cannot precisely capture, or rule out, certain behaviors of the system. In this paper, we propose a novel framework aimed at drastically reducing the undesirable behavior of DRL-based software, while maintaining its excellent performance. In addition, our framework can assist in providing engineers with a comprehensible characterization of such undesirable behavior. Under the hood, our approach is based on extracting decision tree classifiers from erroneous state-action pairs, and then integrating these trees into the DRL training loop, penalizing the system whenever it performs an error. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of our approach, and use it to evaluate the technique on three significant case studies. We find that our approach can extend existing frameworks in a straightforward manner, and incurs only a slight overhead in training time. Further, it incurs only a very slight hit to performance, or even in some cases - improves it, while significantly reducing the frequency of undesirable behavior.
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.
Despite the recent progress in deep learning, most approaches still go for a silo-like solution, focusing on learning each task in isolation: training a separate neural network for each individual task. Many real-world problems, however, call for a multi-modal approach and, therefore, for multi-tasking models. Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to leverage useful information across tasks to improve the generalization capability of a model. This thesis is concerned with multi-task learning in the context of computer vision. First, we review existing approaches for MTL. Next, we propose several methods that tackle important aspects of multi-task learning. The proposed methods are evaluated on various benchmarks. The results show several advances in the state-of-the-art of multi-task learning. Finally, we discuss several possibilities for future work.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
Geometric deep learning (GDL), which is based on neural network architectures that incorporate and process symmetry information, has emerged as a recent paradigm in artificial intelligence. GDL bears particular promise in molecular modeling applications, in which various molecular representations with different symmetry properties and levels of abstraction exist. This review provides a structured and harmonized overview of molecular GDL, highlighting its applications in drug discovery, chemical synthesis prediction, and quantum chemistry. Emphasis is placed on the relevance of the learned molecular features and their complementarity to well-established molecular descriptors. This review provides an overview of current challenges and opportunities, and presents a forecast of the future of GDL for molecular sciences.
This paper aims to mitigate straggler effects in synchronous distributed learning for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Stragglers arise frequently in a distributed learning system, due to the existence of various system disturbances such as slow-downs or failures of compute nodes and communication bottlenecks. To resolve this issue, we propose a coded distributed learning framework, which speeds up the training of MARL algorithms in the presence of stragglers, while maintaining the same accuracy as the centralized approach. As an illustration, a coded distributed version of the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient(MADDPG) algorithm is developed and evaluated. Different coding schemes, including maximum distance separable (MDS)code, random sparse code, replication-based code, and regular low density parity check (LDPC) code are also investigated. Simulations in several multi-robot problems demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed framework.
Rehearsal, seeking to remind the model by storing old knowledge in lifelong learning, is one of the most effective ways to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, i.e., biased forgetting of previous knowledge when moving to new tasks. However, the old tasks of the most previous rehearsal-based methods suffer from the unpredictable domain shift when training the new task. This is because these methods always ignore two significant factors. First, the Data Imbalance between the new task and old tasks that makes the domain of old tasks prone to shift. Second, the Task Isolation among all tasks will make the domain shift toward unpredictable directions; To address the unpredictable domain shift, in this paper, we propose Multi-Domain Multi-Task (MDMT) rehearsal to train the old tasks and new task parallelly and equally to break the isolation among tasks. Specifically, a two-level angular margin loss is proposed to encourage the intra-class/task compactness and inter-class/task discrepancy, which keeps the model from domain chaos. In addition, to further address domain shift of the old tasks, we propose an optional episodic distillation loss on the memory to anchor the knowledge for each old task. Experiments on benchmark datasets validate the proposed approach can effectively mitigate the unpredictable domain shift.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.
As a new classification platform, deep learning has recently received increasing attention from researchers and has been successfully applied to many domains. In some domains, like bioinformatics and robotics, it is very difficult to construct a large-scale well-annotated dataset due to the expense of data acquisition and costly annotation, which limits its development. Transfer learning relaxes the hypothesis that the training data must be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) with the test data, which motivates us to use transfer learning to solve the problem of insufficient training data. This survey focuses on reviewing the current researches of transfer learning by using deep neural network and its applications. We defined deep transfer learning, category and review the recent research works based on the techniques used in deep transfer learning.