Reinforcement learning (RL) and brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are two fields that have been growing over the past decade. Until recently, these fields have operated independently of one another. With the rising interest in human-in-the-loop (HITL) applications, RL algorithms have been adapted to account for human guidance giving rise to the sub-field of interactive reinforcement learning (IRL). Adjacently, BCI applications have been long interested in extracting intrinsic feedback from neural activity during human-computer interactions. These two ideas have set RL and BCI on a collision course for one another through the integration of BCI into the IRL framework where intrinsic feedback can be utilized to help train an agent. This intersection has been denoted as intrinsic IRL. To further help facilitate deeper ingratiation of BCI and IRL, we provide a review of intrinsic IRL with an emphasis on its parent field of feedback-driven IRL while also providing discussions concerning the validity, challenges, and future research directions.
Deep reinforcement learning has gathered much attention recently. Impressive results were achieved in activities as diverse as autonomous driving, game playing, molecular recombination, and robotics. In all these fields, computer programs have taught themselves to solve difficult problems. They have learned to fly model helicopters and perform aerobatic manoeuvers such as loops and rolls. In some applications they have even become better than the best humans, such as in Atari, Go, poker and StarCraft. The way in which deep reinforcement learning explores complex environments reminds us of how children learn, by playfully trying out things, getting feedback, and trying again. The computer seems to truly possess aspects of human learning; this goes to the heart of the dream of artificial intelligence. The successes in research have not gone unnoticed by educators, and universities have started to offer courses on the subject. The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview of the field of deep reinforcement learning. The book is written for graduate students of artificial intelligence, and for researchers and practitioners who wish to better understand deep reinforcement learning methods and their challenges. We assume an undergraduate-level of understanding of computer science and artificial intelligence; the programming language of this book is Python. We describe the foundations, the algorithms and the applications of deep reinforcement learning. We cover the established model-free and model-based methods that form the basis of the field. Developments go quickly, and we also cover advanced topics: deep multi-agent reinforcement learning, deep hierarchical reinforcement learning, and deep meta learning.
In real-world recommendation problems, especially those with a formidably large item space, users have to gradually learn to estimate the utility of any fresh recommendations from their experience about previously consumed items. This in turn affects their interaction dynamics with the system and can invalidate previous algorithms built on the omniscient user assumption. In this paper, we formalize a model to capture such "learning users" and design an efficient system-side learning solution, coined Noise-Robust Active Ellipsoid Search (RAES), to confront the challenges brought by the non-stationary feedback from such a learning user. Interestingly, we prove that the regret of RAES deteriorates gracefully as the convergence rate of user learning becomes worse, until reaching linear regret when the user's learning fails to converge. Experiments on synthetic datasets demonstrate the strength of RAES for such a contemporaneous system-user learning problem. Our study provides a novel perspective on modeling the feedback loop in recommendation problems.
The combination of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with deep learning has led to a series of impressive feats, with many believing (deep) RL provides a path towards generally capable agents. However, the success of RL agents is often highly sensitive to design choices in the training process, which may require tedious and error-prone manual tuning. This makes it challenging to use RL for new problems, while also limits its full potential. In many other areas of machine learning, AutoML has shown it is possible to automate such design choices and has also yielded promising initial results when applied to RL. However, Automated Reinforcement Learning (AutoRL) involves not only standard applications of AutoML but also includes additional challenges unique to RL, that naturally produce a different set of methods. As such, AutoRL has been emerging as an important area of research in RL, providing promise in a variety of applications from RNA design to playing games such as Go. Given the diversity of methods and environments considered in RL, much of the research has been conducted in distinct subfields, ranging from meta-learning to evolution. In this survey we seek to unify the field of AutoRL, we provide a common taxonomy, discuss each area in detail and pose open problems which would be of interest to researchers going forward.
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.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Deep Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have achieved significant success across a wide range of domains, such as game AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics and finance. However, DRL and deep MARL agents are widely known to be sample-inefficient and millions of interactions are usually needed even for relatively simple game settings, thus preventing the wide application in real-industry scenarios. One bottleneck challenge behind is the well-known exploration problem, i.e., how to efficiently explore the unknown environments and collect informative experiences that could benefit the policy learning most. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on existing exploration methods in DRL and deep MARL for the purpose of providing understandings and insights on the critical problems and solutions. We first identify several key challenges to achieve efficient exploration, which most of the exploration methods aim at addressing. Then we provide a systematic survey of existing approaches by classifying them into two major categories: uncertainty-oriented exploration and intrinsic motivation-oriented exploration. The essence of uncertainty-oriented exploration is to leverage the quantification of the epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty to derive efficient exploration. By contrast, intrinsic motivation-oriented exploration methods usually incorporate different reward agnostic information for intrinsic exploration guidance. Beyond the above two main branches, we also conclude other exploration methods which adopt sophisticated techniques but are difficult to be classified into the above two categories. In addition, we provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of exploration methods for DRL on a set of commonly used benchmarks. Finally, we summarize the open problems of exploration in DRL and deep MARL and point out a few future directions.
Graphs are widely used as a popular representation of the network structure of connected data. Graph data can be found in a broad spectrum of application domains such as social systems, ecosystems, biological networks, knowledge graphs, and information systems. With the continuous penetration of artificial intelligence technologies, graph learning (i.e., machine learning on graphs) is gaining attention from both researchers and practitioners. Graph learning proves effective for many tasks, such as classification, link prediction, and matching. Generally, graph learning methods extract relevant features of graphs by taking advantage of machine learning algorithms. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview on the state-of-the-art of graph learning. Special attention is paid to four categories of existing graph learning methods, including graph signal processing, matrix factorization, random walk, and deep learning. Major models and algorithms under these categories are reviewed respectively. We examine graph learning applications in areas such as text, images, science, knowledge graphs, and combinatorial optimization. In addition, we discuss several promising research directions in this field.
Curriculum learning (CL) is a training strategy that trains a machine learning model from easier data to harder data, which imitates the meaningful learning order in human curricula. As an easy-to-use plug-in, the CL strategy has demonstrated its power in improving the generalization capacity and convergence rate of various models in a wide range of scenarios such as computer vision and natural language processing etc. In this survey article, we comprehensively review CL from various aspects including motivations, definitions, theories, and applications. We discuss works on curriculum learning within a general CL framework, elaborating on how to design a manually predefined curriculum or an automatic curriculum. In particular, we summarize existing CL designs based on the general framework of Difficulty Measurer+Training Scheduler and further categorize the methodologies for automatic CL into four groups, i.e., Self-paced Learning, Transfer Teacher, RL Teacher, and Other Automatic CL. We also analyze principles to select different CL designs that may benefit practical applications. Finally, we present our insights on the relationships connecting CL and other machine learning concepts including transfer learning, meta-learning, continual learning and active learning, etc., then point out challenges in CL as well as potential future research directions deserving further investigations.
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.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still requires a large amount of interaction with the environment, which can be prohibitively expensive in realistic scenarios. To address this problem, transfer learning has been applied to reinforcement learning such that experience gained in one task can be leveraged when starting to learn the next, harder task. More recently, several lines of research have explored how tasks, or data samples themselves, can be sequenced into a curriculum for the purpose of learning a problem that may otherwise be too difficult to learn from scratch. In this article, we present a framework for curriculum learning (CL) in reinforcement learning, and use it to survey and classify existing CL methods in terms of their assumptions, capabilities, and goals. Finally, we use our framework to find open problems and suggest directions for future RL curriculum learning research.
Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods are limited typically to a small number of agents. When the agent number increases largely, the learning becomes intractable due to the curse of the dimensionality and the exponential growth of agent interactions. In this paper, we present Mean Field Reinforcement Learning where the interactions within the population of agents are approximated by those between a single agent and the average effect from the overall population or neighboring agents; the interplay between the two entities is mutually reinforced: the learning of the individual agent's optimal policy depends on the dynamics of the population, while the dynamics of the population change according to the collective patterns of the individual policies. We develop practical mean field Q-learning and mean field Actor-Critic algorithms and analyze the convergence of the solution to Nash equilibrium. Experiments on Gaussian squeeze, Ising model, and battle games justify the learning effectiveness of our mean field approaches. In addition, we report the first result to solve the Ising model via model-free reinforcement learning methods.