Combating an epidemic entails finding a plan that describes when and how to apply different interventions, such as mask-wearing mandates, vaccinations, school or workplace closures. An optimal plan will curb an epidemic with minimal loss of life, disease burden, and economic cost. Finding an optimal plan is an intractable computational problem in realistic settings. Policy-makers, however, would greatly benefit from tools that can efficiently search for plans that minimize disease and economic costs especially when considering multiple possible interventions over a continuous and complex action space given a continuous and equally complex state space. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process. Our formulation is unique in its ability to represent multiple continuous interventions over any disease model defined by ordinary differential equations. We illustrate how to effectively apply state-of-the-art actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms (PPO and SAC) to search for plans that minimize overall costs. We empirically evaluate the learning performance of these algorithms and compare their performance to hand-crafted baselines that mimic plans constructed by policy-makers. Our method outperforms baselines. Our work confirms the viability of a computational approach to support policy-makers
This paper proposes a novel approach to predict epidemiological parameters by integrating new real-time signals from various sources of information, such as novel social media-based population density maps and Air Quality data. We implement an ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models using various data sources and fusion methodology to build robust predictions and simulate several dynamic parameters that could improve the decision-making process for policymakers. Additionally, we used data assimilation to estimate the state of our system from fused CNN predictions. The combination of meteorological signals and social media-based population density maps improved the performance and flexibility of our prediction of the COVID-19 outbreak in London. While the proposed approach outperforms standard models, such as compartmental models traditionally used in disease forecasting (SEIR), generating robust and consistent predictions allows us to increase the stability of our model while increasing its accuracy.
Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used: imitation learning which is suitable for expert datasets and vanilla offline RL which often requires uniform coverage datasets. From a practical standpoint, datasets often deviate from these two extremes and the exact data composition is usually unknown a priori. To bridge this gap, we present a new offline RL framework that smoothly interpolates between the two extremes of data composition, hence unifying imitation learning and vanilla offline RL. The new framework is centered around a weak version of the concentrability coefficient that measures the deviation from the behavior policy to the expert policy alone. Under this new framework, we further investigate the question on algorithm design: can one develop an algorithm that achieves a minimax optimal rate and also adapts to unknown data composition? To address this question, we consider a lower confidence bound (LCB) algorithm developed based on pessimism in the face of uncertainty in offline RL. We study finite-sample properties of LCB as well as information-theoretic limits in multi-armed bandits, contextual bandits, and Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our analysis reveals surprising facts about optimality rates. In particular, in all three settings, LCB achieves a faster rate of $1/N$ for nearly-expert datasets compared to the usual rate of $1/\sqrt{N}$ in offline RL, where $N$ is the number of samples in the batch dataset. In the case of contextual bandits with at least two contexts, we prove that LCB is adaptively optimal for the entire data composition range, achieving a smooth transition from imitation learning to offline RL. We further show that LCB is almost adaptively optimal in MDPs.
The focus of this work is sample-efficient deep reinforcement learning (RL) with a simulator. One useful property of simulators is that it is typically easy to reset the environment to a previously observed state. We propose an algorithmic framework, named uncertainty-first local planning (UFLP), that takes advantage of this property. Concretely, in each data collection iteration, with some probability, our meta-algorithm resets the environment to an observed state which has high uncertainty, instead of sampling according to the initial-state distribution. The agent-environment interaction then proceeds as in the standard online RL setting. We demonstrate that this simple procedure can dramatically improve the sample cost of several baseline RL algorithms on difficult exploration tasks. Notably, with our framework, we can achieve super-human performance on the notoriously hard Atari game, Montezuma's Revenge, with a simple (distributional) double DQN. Our work can be seen as an efficient approximate implementation of an existing algorithm with theoretical guarantees, which offers an interpretation of the positive empirical results.
Given the special situation of modeling gigapixel images, multiple instance learning (MIL) has become one of the most important frameworks for Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification. In current practice, most MIL networks often face two unavoidable problems in training: i) insufficient WSI data, and ii) the sample memorization inclination inherent in neural networks. These problems may hinder MIL models from adequate and efficient training, suppressing the continuous performance promotion of classification models on WSIs. Inspired by the basic idea of Mixup, this paper proposes a new Pseudo-bag Mixup (PseMix) data augmentation scheme to improve the training of MIL models. This scheme generalizes the Mixup strategy for general images to special WSIs via pseudo-bags so as to be applied in MIL-based WSI classification. Cooperated by pseudo-bags, our PseMix fulfills the critical size alignment and semantic alignment in Mixup strategy. Moreover, it is designed as an efficient and decoupled method, neither involving time-consuming operations nor relying on MIL model predictions. Comparative experiments and ablation studies are specially designed to evaluate the effectiveness and advantages of our PseMix. Experimental results show that PseMix could often assist state-of-the-art MIL networks to refresh the classification performance on WSIs. Besides, it could also boost the generalization ability of MIL models, and promote their robustness to patch occlusion and noisy labels. Our source code is available at //github.com/liupei101/PseMix.
Deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance on several computer vision tasks and domains. Nevertheless, it still has a high computational cost and demands a significant amount of parameters. Such requirements hinder the use in resource-limited environments and demand both software and hardware optimization. Another limitation is that deep models are usually specialized into a single domain or task, requiring them to learn and store new parameters for each new one. Multi-Domain Learning (MDL) attempts to solve this problem by learning a single model that is capable of performing well in multiple domains. Nevertheless, the models are usually larger than the baseline for a single domain. This work tackles both of these problems: our objective is to prune models capable of handling multiple domains according to a user defined budget, making them more computationally affordable while keeping a similar classification performance. We achieve this by encouraging all domains to use a similar subset of filters from the baseline model, up to the amount defined by the user's budget. Then, filters that are not used by any domain are pruned from the network. The proposed approach innovates by better adapting to resource-limited devices while, to our knowledge, being the only work that is capable of handling multiple domains at test time with fewer parameters and lower computational complexity than the baseline model for a single domain.
In recent years, by leveraging more data, computation, and diverse tasks, learned optimizers have achieved remarkable success in supervised learning, outperforming classical hand-designed optimizers. Reinforcement learning (RL) is essentially different from supervised learning and in practice these learned optimizers do not work well even in simple RL tasks. We investigate this phenomenon and identity three issues. First, the gradients of an RL agent vary across a wide range in logarithms while their absolute values are in a small range, making neural networks hard to obtain accurate parameter updates. Second, the agent-gradient distribution is non-independent and identically distributed, leading to inefficient meta-training. Finally, due to highly stochastic agent-environment interactions, the agent-gradients have high bias and variance, which increase the difficulty of learning an optimizer for RL. We propose gradient processing, pipeline training, and a novel optimizer structure with good inductive bias to address these issues. By applying these techniques, for the first time, we show that learning an optimizer for RL from scratch is possible. Although only trained in toy tasks, our learned optimizer can generalize to unseen complex tasks in Brax.
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.
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.
Properly handling missing data is a fundamental challenge in recommendation. Most present works perform negative sampling from unobserved data to supply the training of recommender models with negative signals. Nevertheless, existing negative sampling strategies, either static or adaptive ones, are insufficient to yield high-quality negative samples --- both informative to model training and reflective of user real needs. In this work, we hypothesize that item knowledge graph (KG), which provides rich relations among items and KG entities, could be useful to infer informative and factual negative samples. Towards this end, we develop a new negative sampling model, Knowledge Graph Policy Network (KGPolicy), which works as a reinforcement learning agent to explore high-quality negatives. Specifically, by conducting our designed exploration operations, it navigates from the target positive interaction, adaptively receives knowledge-aware negative signals, and ultimately yields a potential negative item to train the recommender. We tested on a matrix factorization (MF) model equipped with KGPolicy, and it achieves significant improvements over both state-of-the-art sampling methods like DNS and IRGAN, and KG-enhanced recommender models like KGAT. Further analyses from different angles provide insights of knowledge-aware sampling. We release the codes and datasets at //github.com/xiangwang1223/kgpolicy.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.