Agents should avoid unsafe behaviour during both training and deployment. This typically requires a simulator and a procedural specification of unsafe behaviour. Unfortunately, a simulator is not always available, and procedurally specifying constraints can be difficult or impossible for many real-world tasks. A recently introduced technique, ReQueST, aims to solve this problem by learning a neural simulator of the environment from safe human trajectories, then using the learned simulator to efficiently learn a reward model from human feedback. However, it is yet unknown whether this approach is feasible in complex 3D environments with feedback obtained from real humans - whether sufficient pixel-based neural simulator quality can be achieved, and whether the human data requirements are viable in terms of both quantity and quality. In this paper we answer this question in the affirmative, using ReQueST to train an agent to perform a 3D first-person object collection task using data entirely from human contractors. We show that the resulting agent exhibits an order of magnitude reduction in unsafe behaviour compared to standard reinforcement learning.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise as a tool for engineering safe, ethical, or legal behaviour in autonomous agents. Its use typically relies on assigning punishments to state-action pairs that constitute unsafe or unethical choices. Despite this assignment being a crucial step in this approach, however, there has been limited discussion on generalizing the process of selecting punishments and deciding where to apply them. In this paper, we adopt an approach that leverages an existing framework -- the normative supervisor of (Neufeld et al., 2021) -- during training. This normative supervisor is used to dynamically translate states and the applicable normative system into defeasible deontic logic theories, feed these theories to a theorem prover, and use the conclusions derived to decide whether or not to assign a punishment to the agent. We use multi-objective RL (MORL) to balance the ethical objective of avoiding violations with a non-ethical objective; we will demonstrate that our approach works for a multiplicity of MORL techniques, and show that it is effective regardless of the magnitude of the punishment we assign.
Embodied AI is a recent research area that aims at creating intelligent agents that can move and operate inside an environment. Existing approaches in this field demand the agents to act in completely new and unexplored scenes. However, this setting is far from realistic use cases that instead require executing multiple tasks in the same environment. Even if the environment changes over time, the agent could still count on its global knowledge about the scene while trying to adapt its internal representation to the current state of the environment. To make a step towards this setting, we propose Spot the Difference: a novel task for Embodied AI where the agent has access to an outdated map of the environment and needs to recover the correct layout in a fixed time budget. To this end, we collect a new dataset of occupancy maps starting from existing datasets of 3D spaces and generating a number of possible layouts for a single environment. This dataset can be employed in the popular Habitat simulator and is fully compliant with existing methods that employ reconstructed occupancy maps during navigation. Furthermore, we propose an exploration policy that can take advantage of previous knowledge of the environment and identify changes in the scene faster and more effectively than existing agents. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture outperforms existing state-of-the-art models for exploration on this new setting.
Context: Forgetting is defined as a gradual process of losing information. Even though there are many studies demonstrating the effect of forgetting in software development, to the best of our knowledge, no study explores the impact of forgetting in software development using a controlled experiment approach. Objective: We would like to provide insights on the impact of forgetting in software development projects. We want to examine whether the recency & frequency of interaction impact forgetting in software development. Methods: We will conduct an experiment that examines the impact of forgetting in software development. Participants will first do an initial task. According to their initial task performance, they will be assigned to either the experiment or the control group. The experiment group will then do two additional tasks to enhance their exposure to the code. Both groups will then do a final task to see if additional exposure to the code benefits the experiment group's performance in the final task. Finally, we will conduct a survey and a recall task with the same participants to collect data about their perceptions of forgetting and quantify their memory performance, respectively.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of sophisticated motion planning and control for robots in uncertain environments. However, state-of-the-art deep RL approaches typically lack safety guarantees, especially when the robot and environment models are unknown. To justify widespread deployment, robots must respect safety constraints without sacrificing performance. Thus, we propose a Black-box Reachability-based Safety Layer (BRSL) with three main components: (1) data-driven reachability analysis for a black-box robot model, (2) a trajectory rollout planner that predicts future actions and observations using an ensemble of neural networks trained online, and (3) a differentiable polytope collision check between the reachable set and obstacles that enables correcting unsafe actions. In simulation, BRSL outperforms other state-of-the-art safe RL methods on a Turtlebot 3, a quadrotor, and a trajectory-tracking point mass with an unsafe set adjacent to the area of highest reward.
Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of performant policies that are diverse with respect to quantified behavior. Recent work shows that differentiable quality diversity (DQD) algorithms greatly accelerate QD optimization when exact gradients are available. However, agent policies typically assume that the environment is not differentiable. To apply DQD algorithms to training agent policies, we must approximate gradients for performance and behavior. We propose two variants of the current state-of-the-art DQD algorithm that compute gradients via approximation methods common in reinforcement learning (RL). We evaluate our approach on four simulated locomotion tasks. One variant achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art in combining QD and RL, while the other performs comparably in two locomotion tasks. These results provide insight into the limitations of current DQD algorithms in domains where gradients must be approximated. Source code is available at //github.com/icaros-usc/dqd-rl
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known sample-inefficiency problem. This means that the algorithms are data-hungry and require millions of training samples to converge to an adequate policy. One way to combat this issue is to use action advising in a teacher-student framework, where a knowledgeable teacher provides action advice to help the student. This work considers how to better leverage uncertainties about when a student should ask for advice and if the student can model the teacher to ask for less advice. The student could decide to ask for advice when it is uncertain or when both it and its model of the teacher are uncertain. In addition to this investigation, this paper introduces a new method to compute uncertainty for a deep RL agent using a secondary neural network. Our empirical results show that using dual uncertainties to drive advice collection and reuse may improve learning performance across several Atari games.
Deep learning depends on large amounts of labeled training data. Manual labeling is expensive and represents a bottleneck, especially for tasks such as segmentation, where labels must be assigned down to the level of individual points. That challenge is even more daunting for 3D data: 3D point clouds contain millions of points per scene, and their accurate annotation is markedly more time-consuming. The situation is further aggravated by the added complexity of user interfaces for 3D point clouds, which slows down annotation even more. For the case of 2D image segmentation, interactive techniques have become common, where user feedback in the form of a few clicks guides a segmentation algorithm -- nowadays usually a neural network -- to achieve an accurate labeling with minimal effort. Surprisingly, interactive segmentation of 3D scenes has not been explored much. Previous work has attempted to obtain accurate 3D segmentation masks using human feedback from the 2D domain, which is only possible if correctly aligned images are available together with the 3D point cloud, and it involves switching between the 2D and 3D domains. Here, we present an interactive 3D object segmentation method in which the user interacts directly with the 3D point cloud. Importantly, our model does not require training data from the target domain: when trained on ScanNet, it performs well on several other datasets with different data characteristics as well as different object classes. Moreover, our method is orthogonal to supervised (instance) segmentation methods and can be combined with them to refine automatic segmentations with minimal human effort.
What is learned by sophisticated neural network agents such as AlphaZero? This question is of both scientific and practical interest. If the representations of strong neural networks bear no resemblance to human concepts, our ability to understand faithful explanations of their decisions will be restricted, ultimately limiting what we can achieve with neural network interpretability. In this work we provide evidence that human knowledge is acquired by the AlphaZero neural network as it trains on the game of chess. By probing for a broad range of human chess concepts we show when and where these concepts are represented in the AlphaZero network. We also provide a behavioural analysis focusing on opening play, including qualitative analysis from chess Grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik. Finally, we carry out a preliminary investigation looking at the low-level details of AlphaZero's representations, and make the resulting behavioural and representational analyses available online.
Due to their increasing spread, confidence in neural network predictions became more and more important. However, basic neural networks do not deliver certainty estimates or suffer from over or under confidence. Many researchers have been working on understanding and quantifying uncertainty in a neural network's prediction. As a result, different types and sources of uncertainty have been identified and a variety of approaches to measure and quantify uncertainty in neural networks have been proposed. This work gives a comprehensive overview of uncertainty estimation in neural networks, reviews recent advances in the field, highlights current challenges, and identifies potential research opportunities. It is intended to give anyone interested in uncertainty estimation in neural networks a broad overview and introduction, without presupposing prior knowledge in this field. A comprehensive introduction to the most crucial sources of uncertainty is given and their separation into reducible model uncertainty and not reducible data uncertainty is presented. The modeling of these uncertainties based on deterministic neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, ensemble of neural networks, and test-time data augmentation approaches is introduced and different branches of these fields as well as the latest developments are discussed. For a practical application, we discuss different measures of uncertainty, approaches for the calibration of neural networks and give an overview of existing baselines and implementations. Different examples from the wide spectrum of challenges in different fields give an idea of the needs and challenges regarding uncertainties in practical applications. Additionally, the practical limitations of current methods for mission- and safety-critical real world applications are discussed and an outlook on the next steps towards a broader usage of such methods is given.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.