In recent years, large amounts of electronic health records (EHRs) concerning chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and mental disease, have been collected to facilitate medical diagnosis. Modeling the dynamic properties of EHRs related to chronic diseases can be efficiently done using dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs), which are a set of sequential decision rules. While Reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely used method for creating DTRs, there is ongoing research in developing RL algorithms that can effectively handle large amounts of data. In this paper, we present a novel approach, a distributed Q-learning algorithm, for generating DTRs. The novelties of our research are as follows: 1) From a methodological perspective, we present a novel and scalable approach for generating DTRs by combining distributed learning with Q-learning. The proposed approach is specifically designed to handle large amounts of data and effectively generate DTRs. 2) From a theoretical standpoint, we provide generalization error bounds for the proposed distributed Q-learning algorithm, which are derived within the framework of statistical learning theory. These bounds quantify the relationships between sample size, prediction accuracy, and computational burden, providing insights into the performance of the algorithm. 3) From an applied perspective, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed distributed Q-learning algorithm for DTRs by applying it to clinical cancer treatments. The results show that our algorithm outperforms both traditional linear Q-learning and commonly used deep Q-learning in terms of both prediction accuracy and computation cost.
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Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach that trains agents to maximize cumulative rewards through interactions with environments. The integration of RL with deep learning has recently resulted in impressive achievements in a wide range of challenging tasks, including board games, arcade games, and robot control. Despite these successes, there remain several crucial challenges, including brittle convergence properties caused by sensitive hyperparameters, difficulties in temporal credit assignment with long time horizons and sparse rewards, a lack of diverse exploration, especially in continuous search space scenarios, difficulties in credit assignment in multi-agent reinforcement learning, and conflicting objectives for rewards. Evolutionary computation (EC), which maintains a population of learning agents, has demonstrated promising performance in addressing these limitations. This article presents a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art methods for integrating EC into RL, referred to as evolutionary reinforcement learning (EvoRL). We categorize EvoRL methods according to key research fields in RL, including hyperparameter optimization, policy search, exploration, reward shaping, meta-RL, and multi-objective RL. We then discuss future research directions in terms of efficient methods, benchmarks, and scalable platforms. This survey serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners interested in the field of EvoRL, highlighting the important challenges and opportunities for future research. With the help of this survey, researchers and practitioners can develop more efficient methods and tailored benchmarks for EvoRL, further advancing this promising cross-disciplinary research field.
In building practical applications of evolutionary computation (EC), two optimizations are essential. First, the parameters of the search method need to be tuned to the domain in order to balance exploration and exploitation effectively. Second, the search method needs to be distributed to take advantage of parallel computing resources. This paper presents BLADE (BLAnket Distributed Evolution) as an approach to achieving both goals simultaneously. BLADE uses blankets (i.e., masks on the genetic representation) to tune the evolutionary operators during the search, and implements the search through hub-and-spoke distribution. In the paper, (1) the blanket method is formalized for the (1 + 1)EA case as a Markov chain process. Its effectiveness is then demonstrated by analyzing dominant and subdominant eigenvalues of stochastic matrices, suggesting a generalizable theory; (2) the fitness-level theory is used to analyze the distribution method; and (3) these insights are verified experimentally on three benchmark problems, showing that both blankets and distribution lead to accelerated evolution. Moreover, a surprising synergy emerges between them: When combined with distribution, the blanket approach achieves more than $n$-fold speedup with $n$ clients in some cases. The work thus highlights the importance and potential of optimizing evolutionary computation in practical applications.
We develop scalable randomized kernel methods for jointly associating data from multiple sources and simultaneously predicting an outcome or classifying a unit into one of two or more classes. The proposed methods model nonlinear relationships in multiview data together with predicting a clinical outcome and are capable of identifying variables or groups of variables that best contribute to the relationships among the views. We use the idea that random Fourier bases can approximate shift-invariant kernel functions to construct nonlinear mappings of each view and we use these mappings and the outcome variable to learn view-independent low-dimensional representations. Through simulation studies, we show that the proposed methods outperform several other linear and nonlinear methods for multiview data integration. When the proposed methods were applied to gene expression, metabolomics, proteomics, and lipidomics data pertaining to COVID-19, we identified several molecular signatures forCOVID-19 status and severity. Results from our real data application and simulations with small sample sizes suggest that the proposed methods may be useful for small sample size problems. Availability: Our algorithms are implemented in Pytorch and interfaced in R and would be made available at: //github.com/lasandrall/RandMVLearn.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in various areas such as video games and robotics. However, ensuring safety and stability, which are two critical properties from a control perspective, remains a significant challenge when using RL to control real-world systems. In this paper, we first provide definitions of safety and stability for the RL system, and then combine the control barrier function (CBF) and control Lyapunov function (CLF) methods with the actor-critic method in RL to propose a Barrier-Lyapunov Actor-Critic (BLAC) framework which helps maintain the aforementioned safety and stability for the system. In this framework, CBF constraints for safety and CLF constraint for stability are constructed based on the data sampled from the replay buffer, and the augmented Lagrangian method is used to update the parameters of the RL-based controller. Furthermore, an additional backup controller is introduced in case the RL-based controller cannot provide valid control signals when safety and stability constraints cannot be satisfied simultaneously. Simulation results show that this framework yields a controller that can help the system approach the desired state and cause fewer violations of safety constraints compared to baseline algorithms.
Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach that uses temporal abstraction to solve complex long horizon problems. However, simultaneously learning a hierarchy of policies is unstable as it is challenging to train higher-level policy when the lower-level primitive is non-stationary. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical algorithm by generating a curriculum of achievable subgoals for evolving lower-level primitives using reinforcement learning and imitation learning. The lower level primitive periodically performs data relabeling on a handful of expert demonstrations using our primitive informed parsing approach. We provide expressions to bound the sub-optimality of our method and develop a practical algorithm for hierarchical reinforcement learning. Since our approach uses a handful of expert demonstrations, it is suitable for most robotic control tasks. Experimental evaluation on complex maze navigation and robotic manipulation environments show that inducing hierarchical curriculum learning significantly improves sample efficiency, and results in efficient goal conditioned policies for solving temporally extended tasks.
With the breakthrough of AlphaGo, deep reinforcement learning becomes a recognized technique for solving sequential decision-making problems. Despite its reputation, data inefficiency caused by its trial and error learning mechanism makes deep reinforcement learning hard to be practical in a wide range of areas. Plenty of methods have been developed for sample efficient deep reinforcement learning, such as environment modeling, experience transfer, and distributed modifications, amongst which, distributed deep reinforcement learning has shown its potential in various applications, such as human-computer gaming, and intelligent transportation. In this paper, we conclude the state of this exciting field, by comparing the classical distributed deep reinforcement learning methods, and studying important components to achieve efficient distributed learning, covering single player single agent distributed deep reinforcement learning to the most complex multiple players multiple agents distributed deep reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we review recently released toolboxes that help to realize distributed deep reinforcement learning without many modifications of their non-distributed versions. By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, a multi-player multi-agent distributed deep reinforcement learning toolbox is developed and released, which is further validated on Wargame, a complex environment, showing usability of the proposed toolbox for multiple players and multiple agents distributed deep reinforcement learning under complex games. Finally, we try to point out challenges and future trends, hoping this brief review can provide a guide or a spark for researchers who are interested in distributed deep reinforcement learning.
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.
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.
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 6 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.
In recent years, a specific machine learning method called deep learning has gained huge attraction, as it has obtained astonishing results in broad applications such as pattern recognition, speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Recent research has also been shown that deep learning techniques can be combined with reinforcement learning methods to learn useful representations for the problems with high dimensional raw data input. This chapter reviews the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning with a focus on the most used deep architectures such as autoencoders, convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks which have successfully been come together with the reinforcement learning framework.
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