Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) is a class of popular state-of-the-art Imitation Learning algorithms where an artificial adversary's misclassification is used as a reward signal and is optimized by any standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm. Unlike most RL settings, the reward in AIL is differentiable but model-free RL algorithms do not make use of this property to train a policy. In contrast, we leverage the differentiability property of the AIL reward function and formulate a class of Actor Residual Critic (ARC) RL algorithms that draw a parallel to the standard Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms in RL literature and uses a residual critic, C function (instead of the standard Q function) to approximate only the discounted future return (excluding the immediate reward). ARC algorithms have similar convergence properties as the standard AC algorithms with the additional advantage that the gradient through the immediate reward is exact. For the discrete (tabular) case with finite states, actions, and known dynamics, we prove that policy iteration with $C$ function converges to an optimal policy. In the continuous case with function approximation and unknown dynamics, we experimentally show that ARC aided AIL outperforms standard AIL in simulated continuous-control and real robotic manipulation tasks. ARC algorithms are simple to implement and can be incorporated into any existing AIL implementation with an AC algorithm.
When learning disconnected distributions, Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are known to face model misspecification. Indeed, a continuous mapping from a unimodal latent distribution to a disconnected one is impossible, so GANs necessarily generate samples outside of the support of the target distribution. This raises a fundamental question: what is the latent space partition that minimizes the measure of these areas? Building on a recent result of geometric measure theory, we prove that an optimal GANs must structure its latent space as a 'simplicial cluster' - a Voronoi partition where cells are convex cones - when the dimension of the latent space is larger than the number of modes. In this configuration, each Voronoi cell maps to a distinct mode of the data. We derive both an upper and a lower bound on the optimal precision of GANs learning disconnected manifolds. Interestingly, these two bounds have the same order of decrease: $\sqrt{\log m}$, $m$ being the number of modes. Finally, we perform several experiments to exhibit the geometry of the latent space and experimentally show that GANs have a geometry with similar properties to the theoretical one.
Impressive results in natural language processing (NLP) based on the Transformer neural network architecture have inspired researchers to explore viewing offline reinforcement learning (RL) as a generic sequence modeling problem. Recent works based on this paradigm have achieved state-of-the-art results in several of the mostly deterministic offline Atari and D4RL benchmarks. However, because these methods jointly model the states and actions as a single sequencing problem, they struggle to disentangle the effects of the policy and world dynamics on the return. Thus, in adversarial or stochastic environments, these methods lead to overly optimistic behavior that can be dangerous in safety-critical systems like autonomous driving. In this work, we propose a method that addresses this optimism bias by explicitly disentangling the policy and world models, which allows us at test time to search for policies that are robust to multiple possible futures in the environment. We demonstrate our method's superior performance on a variety of autonomous driving tasks in simulation.
Effective exploration continues to be a significant challenge that prevents the deployment of reinforcement learning for many physical systems. This is particularly true for systems with continuous and high-dimensional state and action spaces, such as robotic manipulators. The challenge is accentuated in the sparse rewards setting, where the low-level state information required for the design of dense rewards is unavailable. Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) can partially overcome this barrier by leveraging expert-generated demonstrations of optimal behaviour and providing, essentially, a replacement for dense reward information. Unfortunately, the availability of expert demonstrations does not necessarily improve an agent's capability to explore effectively and, as we empirically show, can lead to inefficient or stagnated learning. We present Learning from Guided Play (LfGP), a framework in which we leverage expert demonstrations of, in addition to a main task, multiple auxiliary tasks. Subsequently, a hierarchical model is used to learn each task reward and policy through a modified AIL procedure, in which exploration of all tasks is enforced via a scheduler composing different tasks together. This affords many benefits: learning efficiency is improved for main tasks with challenging bottleneck transitions, expert data becomes reusable between tasks, and transfer learning through the reuse of learned auxiliary task models becomes possible. Our experimental results in a challenging multitask robotic manipulation domain indicate that our method compares favourably to supervised imitation learning and to a state-of-the-art AIL method. Code is available at //github.com/utiasSTARS/lfgp.
The transformer architecture and variants presented remarkable success across many machine learning tasks in recent years. This success is intrinsically related to the capability of handling long sequences and the presence of context-dependent weights from the attention mechanism. We argue that these capabilities suit the central role of a Meta-Reinforcement Learning algorithm. Indeed, a meta-RL agent needs to infer the task from a sequence of trajectories. Furthermore, it requires a fast adaptation strategy to adapt its policy for a new task -- which can be achieved using the self-attention mechanism. In this work, we present TrMRL (Transformers for Meta-Reinforcement Learning), a meta-RL agent that mimics the memory reinstatement mechanism using the transformer architecture. It associates the recent past of working memories to build an episodic memory recursively through the transformer layers. We show that the self-attention computes a consensus representation that minimizes the Bayes Risk at each layer and provides meaningful features to compute the best actions. We conducted experiments in high-dimensional continuous control environments for locomotion and dexterous manipulation. Results show that TrMRL presents comparable or superior asymptotic performance, sample efficiency, and out-of-distribution generalization compared to the baselines in these environments.
Advances in artificial intelligence often stem from the development of new environments that abstract real-world situations into a form where research can be done conveniently. This paper contributes such an environment based on ideas inspired by elementary Microeconomics. Agents learn to produce resources in a spatially complex world, trade them with one another, and consume those that they prefer. We show that the emergent production, consumption, and pricing behaviors respond to environmental conditions in the directions predicted by supply and demand shifts in Microeconomics. We also demonstrate settings where the agents' emergent prices for goods vary over space, reflecting the local abundance of goods. After the price disparities emerge, some agents then discover a niche of transporting goods between regions with different prevailing prices -- a profitable strategy because they can buy goods where they are cheap and sell them where they are expensive. Finally, in a series of ablation experiments, we investigate how choices in the environmental rewards, bartering actions, agent architecture, and ability to consume tradable goods can either aid or inhibit the emergence of this economic behavior. This work is part of the environment development branch of a research program that aims to build human-like artificial general intelligence through multi-agent interactions in simulated societies. By exploring which environment features are needed for the basic phenomena of elementary microeconomics to emerge automatically from learning, we arrive at an environment that differs from those studied in prior multi-agent reinforcement learning work along several dimensions. For example, the model incorporates heterogeneous tastes and physical abilities, and agents negotiate with one another as a grounded form of communication.
Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
Deep Learning algorithms have achieved the state-of-the-art performance for Image Classification and have been used even in security-critical applications, such as biometric recognition systems and self-driving cars. However, recent works have shown those algorithms, which can even surpass the human capabilities, are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In Computer Vision, adversarial examples are images containing subtle perturbations generated by malicious optimization algorithms in order to fool classifiers. As an attempt to mitigate these vulnerabilities, numerous countermeasures have been constantly proposed in literature. Nevertheless, devising an efficient defense mechanism has proven to be a difficult task, since many approaches have already shown to be ineffective to adaptive attackers. Thus, this self-containing paper aims to provide all readerships with a review of the latest research progress on Adversarial Machine Learning in Image Classification, however with a defender's perspective. Here, novel taxonomies for categorizing adversarial attacks and defenses are introduced and discussions about the existence of adversarial examples are provided. Further, in contrast to exisiting surveys, it is also given relevant guidance that should be taken into consideration by researchers when devising and evaluating defenses. Finally, based on the reviewed literature, it is discussed some promising paths for future research.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extensively studied in the past few years. Arguably the revolutionary techniques are in the area of computer vision such as plausible image generation, image to image translation, facial attribute manipulation and similar domains. Despite the significant success achieved in computer vision field, applying GANs over real-world problems still have three main challenges: (1) High quality image generation; (2) Diverse image generation; and (3) Stable training. Considering numerous GAN-related research in the literature, we provide a study on the architecture-variants and loss-variants, which are proposed to handle these three challenges from two perspectives. We propose loss and architecture-variants for classifying most popular GANs, and discuss the potential improvements with focusing on these two aspects. While several reviews for GANs have been presented, there is no work focusing on the review of GAN-variants based on handling challenges mentioned above. In this paper, we review and critically discuss 7 architecture-variant GANs and 9 loss-variant GANs for remedying those three challenges. The objective of this review is to provide an insight on the footprint that current GANs research focuses on the performance improvement. Code related to GAN-variants studied in this work is summarized on //github.com/sheqi/GAN_Review.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.