Martin Riedmiller

Bio: Martin Riedmiller is an academic researcher from Google. The author has contributed to research in topics: Reinforcement learning & Artificial neural network. The author has an hindex of 50, co-authored 185 publications receiving 44470 citations. Previous affiliations of Martin Riedmiller include University of Osnabrück & Technical University of Dortmund.

Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning

Abstract: The theory of reinforcement learning provides a normative account, deeply rooted in psychological and neuroscientific perspectives on animal behaviour, of how agents may optimize their control of an environment. To use reinforcement learning successfully in situations approaching real-world complexity, however, agents are confronted with a difficult task: they must derive efficient representations of the environment from high-dimensional sensory inputs, and use these to generalize past experience to new situations. Remarkably, humans and other animals seem to solve this problem through a harmonious combination of reinforcement learning and hierarchical sensory processing systems, the former evidenced by a wealth of neural data revealing notable parallels between the phasic signals emitted by dopaminergic neurons and temporal difference reinforcement learning algorithms. While reinforcement learning agents have achieved some successes in a variety of domains, their applicability has previously been limited to domains in which useful features can be handcrafted, or to domains with fully observed, low-dimensional state spaces. Here we use recent advances in training deep neural networks to develop a novel artificial agent, termed a deep Q-network, that can learn successful policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs using end-to-end reinforcement learning. We tested this agent on the challenging domain of classic Atari 2600 games. We demonstrate that the deep Q-network agent, receiving only the pixels and the game score as inputs, was able to surpass the performance of all previous algorithms and achieve a level comparable to that of a professional human games tester across a set of 49 games, using the same algorithm, network architecture and hyperparameters. This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: We present the first deep learning model to successfully learn control policies directly from high-dimensional sensory input using reinforcement learning. The model is a convolutional neural network, trained with a variant of Q-learning, whose input is raw pixels and whose output is a value function estimating future rewards. We apply our method to seven Atari 2600 games from the Arcade Learning Environment, with no adjustment of the architecture or learning algorithm. We find that it outperforms all previous approaches on six of the games and surpasses a human expert on three of them.

A direct adaptive method for faster backpropagation learning: the RPROP algorithm

Abstract: A learning algorithm for multilayer feedforward networks, RPROP (resilient propagation), is proposed. To overcome the inherent disadvantages of pure gradient-descent, RPROP performs a local adaptation of the weight-updates according to the behavior of the error function. Contrary to other adaptive techniques, the effect of the RPROP adaptation process is not blurred by the unforeseeable influence of the size of the derivative, but only dependent on the temporal behavior of its sign. This leads to an efficient and transparent adaptation process. The capabilities of RPROP are shown in comparison to other adaptive techniques. >

Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Net

Abstract: Most modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) used for object recognition are built using the same principles: Alternating convolution and max-pooling layers followed by a small number of fully connected layers. We re-evaluate the state of the art for object recognition from small images with convolutional networks, questioning the necessity of different components in the pipeline. We find that max-pooling can simply be replaced by a convolutional layer with increased stride without loss in accuracy on several image recognition benchmarks. Following this finding -- and building on other recent work for finding simple network structures -- we propose a new architecture that consists solely of convolutional layers and yields competitive or state of the art performance on several object recognition datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet). To analyze the network we introduce a new variant of the "deconvolution approach" for visualizing features learned by CNNs, which can be applied to a broader range of network structures than existing approaches.

Deterministic Policy Gradient Algorithms

Abstract: In this paper we consider deterministic policy gradient algorithms for reinforcement learning with continuous actions. The deterministic policy gradient has a particularly appealing form: it is the expected gradient of the action-value function. This simple form means that the deterministic policy gradient can be estimated much more efficiently than the usual stochastic policy gradient. To ensure adequate exploration, we introduce an off-policy actor-critic algorithm that learns a deterministic target policy from an exploratory behaviour policy. We demonstrate that deterministic policy gradient algorithms can significantly outperform their stochastic counterparts in high-dimensional action spaces.

U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation

Abstract: There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .

Deep learning

Abstract: Deep learning allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. These methods have dramatically improved the state-of-the-art in speech recognition, visual object recognition, object detection and many other domains such as drug discovery and genomics. Deep learning discovers intricate structure in large data sets by using the backpropagation algorithm to indicate how a machine should change its internal parameters that are used to compute the representation in each layer from the representation in the previous layer. Deep convolutional nets have brought about breakthroughs in processing images, video, speech and audio, whereas recurrent nets have shone light on sequential data such as text and speech.

Deep Learning

Abstract: Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning. The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models. Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.

Densely Connected Convolutional Networks

Abstract: Recent work has shown that convolutional networks can be substantially deeper, more accurate, and efficient to train if they contain shorter connections between layers close to the input and those close to the output. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion. Whereas traditional convolutional networks with L layers have L connections—one between each layer and its subsequent layer—our network has L(L+1)/2 direct connections. For each layer, the feature-maps of all preceding layers are used as inputs, and its own feature-maps are used as inputs into all subsequent layers. DenseNets have several compelling advantages: they alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters. We evaluate our proposed architecture on four highly competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet). DenseNets obtain significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on most of them, whilst requiring less memory and computation to achieve high performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/liuzhuang13/DenseNet.