Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
TL;DR: 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.
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.
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Posted Content•
TL;DR: It is argued that combinatorial generalization must be a top priority for AI to achieve human-like abilities, and that structured representations and computations are key to realizing this objective.
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a renaissance recently, making major progress in key domains such as vision, language, control, and decision-making. This has been due, in part, to cheap data and cheap compute resources, which have fit the natural strengths of deep learning. However, many defining characteristics of human intelligence, which developed under much different pressures, remain out of reach for current approaches. In particular, generalizing beyond one's experiences--a hallmark of human intelligence from infancy--remains a formidable challenge for modern AI.
The following is part position paper, part review, and part unification. We argue that combinatorial generalization must be a top priority for AI to achieve human-like abilities, and that structured representations and computations are key to realizing this objective. Just as biology uses nature and nurture cooperatively, we reject the false choice between "hand-engineering" and "end-to-end" learning, and instead advocate for an approach which benefits from their complementary strengths. We explore how using relational inductive biases within deep learning architectures can facilitate learning about entities, relations, and rules for composing them. We present a new building block for the AI toolkit with a strong relational inductive bias--the graph network--which generalizes and extends various approaches for neural networks that operate on graphs, and provides a straightforward interface for manipulating structured knowledge and producing structured behaviors. We discuss how graph networks can support relational reasoning and combinatorial generalization, laying the foundation for more sophisticated, interpretable, and flexible patterns of reasoning. As a companion to this paper, we have released an open-source software library for building graph networks, with demonstrations of how to use them in practice.
2,170 citations
Cites background from "Human-level control through deep re..."
..., 2015), to game play (Mnih et al., 2015; Silver et al., 2016; Moravč́ık et al., 2017), are a testament to this minimalist principle....
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...…domains, from image classification (Krizhevsky et al., 2012; Szegedy et al., 2017), to natural language processing (Sutskever et al., 2014; Bahdanau et al., 2015), to game play (Mnih et al., 2015; Silver et al., 2016; Moravč́ık et al., 2017), are a testament to this minimalist principle....
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20 Mar 2017
TL;DR: This paper explores domain randomization, a simple technique for training models on simulated images that transfer to real images by randomizing rendering in the simulator, and achieves the first successful transfer of a deep neural network trained only on simulated RGB images to the real world for the purpose of robotic control.
Abstract: Bridging the ‘reality gap’ that separates simulated robotics from experiments on hardware could accelerate robotic research through improved data availability. This paper explores domain randomization, a simple technique for training models on simulated images that transfer to real images by randomizing rendering in the simulator. With enough variability in the simulator, the real world may appear to the model as just another variation. We focus on the task of object localization, which is a stepping stone to general robotic manipulation skills. We find that it is possible to train a real-world object detector that is accurate to 1.5 cm and robust to distractors and partial occlusions using only data from a simulator with non-realistic random textures. To demonstrate the capabilities of our detectors, we show they can be used to perform grasping in a cluttered environment. To our knowledge, this is the first successful transfer of a deep neural network trained only on simulated RGB images (without pre-training on real images) to the real world for the purpose of robotic control.
2,079 citations
Cites background or result from "Human-level control through deep re..."
...Learning in simulation is especially promising for building on recent results using deep reinforcement learning to achieve human-level performance on tasks like Atari [27] and robotic control [21], [38]....
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...It often requires hundreds of thousands or millions of samples [29], which could take thousands of hours to collect, making it impractical for many applications....
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...Learning in simulation is especially promising for building on recent results using deep reinforcement learning to achieve human-level performance on tasks like Atari [29] and robotic control [26], [41]....
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TL;DR: In this article, a review of recent progress in cognitive science suggests that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn and how they learn it.
Abstract: Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (1) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (2) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (3) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes toward these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.
2,010 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: This paper presents a new neural network architecture for model-free reinforcement learning that leads to better policy evaluation in the presence of many similar-valued actions and enables the RL agent to outperform the state-of-the-art on the Atari 2600 domain.
Abstract: In recent years there have been many successes of using deep representations in reinforcement learning. Still, many of these applications use conventional architectures, such as convolutional networks, LSTMs, or auto-encoders. In this paper, we present a new neural network architecture for model-free reinforcement learning. Our dueling network represents two separate estimators: one for the state value function and one for the state-dependent action advantage function. The main benefit of this factoring is to generalize learning across actions without imposing any change to the underlying reinforcement learning algorithm. Our results show that this architecture leads to better policy evaluation in the presence of many similar-valued actions. Moreover, the dueling architecture enables our RL agent to outperform the state-of-the-art on the Atari 2600 domain.
2,010 citations
Cites background or methods or result from "Human-level control through deep re..."
...(6) DDQN is the same as for DQN (see Mnih et al. (2015)), but with the target yDQNi replaced by y DDQN i ....
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...The results illustrate vast improvements over the single-stream baselines of Mnih et al. (2015) and van Hasselt et al. (2015)....
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...Training of the dueling architectures, as with standard Q networks (e.g. the deep Q-network of Mnih et al. (2015)), requires only back-propagation....
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...A key innovation in (Mnih et al., 2015) was to freeze the parameters of the target network Q(s′, a′; θ−) for a fixed number of iterations while updating the online network Q(s, a; θi) by gradient descent....
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...…architecture is complementary to algorithmic innovations, we show that it improves performance for both the uniform and the prioritized replay baselines (for which we picked the easier to implement rank-based variant), with the resulting prioritized dueling variant holding the new state-of-the-art....
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Posted Content•
TL;DR: This paper builds on Double Q-learning, by taking the minimum value between a pair of critics to limit overestimation, and draws the connection between target networks and overestimation bias.
Abstract: In value-based reinforcement learning methods such as deep Q-learning, function approximation errors are known to lead to overestimated value estimates and suboptimal policies. We show that this problem persists in an actor-critic setting and propose novel mechanisms to minimize its effects on both the actor and the critic. Our algorithm builds on Double Q-learning, by taking the minimum value between a pair of critics to limit overestimation. We draw the connection between target networks and overestimation bias, and suggest delaying policy updates to reduce per-update error and further improve performance. We evaluate our method on the suite of OpenAI gym tasks, outperforming the state of the art in every environment tested.
1,968 citations
Cites methods from "Human-level control through deep re..."
...In deep Q-learning (Mnih et al., 2015), the network is updated by using temporal difference learning with a secondary frozen target network Qθ′(s, a) to maintain a fixed...
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...In deep Q-learning (Mnih et al., 2015), the network is updated by using temporal difference learning with a secondary frozen target network Qθ′(s, a) to maintain a fixed objective y over multiple updates: y = r + γQθ′(s ′, a′), a′ ∼ πφ′(s′), (3) where the actions are selected from a target actor…...
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References
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Proceedings Article•
03 Dec 2012TL;DR: The state-of-the-art performance of CNNs was achieved by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) as discussed by the authors, which consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax.
Abstract: We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0% which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overriding in the fully-connected layers we employed a recently-developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry.
73,978 citations
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: In this article, a graph transformer network (GTN) is proposed for handwritten character recognition, which can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters.
Abstract: Multilayer neural networks trained with the back-propagation algorithm constitute the best example of a successful gradient based learning technique. Given an appropriate network architecture, gradient-based learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing. This paper reviews various methods applied to handwritten character recognition and compares them on a standard handwritten digit recognition task. Convolutional neural networks, which are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques. Real-life document recognition systems are composed of multiple modules including field extraction, segmentation recognition, and language modeling. A new learning paradigm, called graph transformer networks (GTN), allows such multimodule systems to be trained globally using gradient-based methods so as to minimize an overall performance measure. Two systems for online handwriting recognition are described. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of global training, and the flexibility of graph transformer networks. A graph transformer network for reading a bank cheque is also described. It uses convolutional neural network character recognizers combined with global training techniques to provide record accuracy on business and personal cheques. It is deployed commercially and reads several million cheques per day.
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Book•
01 Jan 1988TL;DR: This book provides a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning, which ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives when interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning. Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications. The only necessary mathematical background is familiarity with elementary concepts of probability. The book is divided into three parts. Part I defines the reinforcement learning problem in terms of Markov decision processes. Part II provides basic solution methods: dynamic programming, Monte Carlo methods, and temporal-difference learning. Part III presents a unified view of the solution methods and incorporates artificial neural networks, eligibility traces, and planning; the two final chapters present case studies and consider the future of reinforcement learning.
37,989 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: A new technique called t-SNE that visualizes high-dimensional data by giving each datapoint a location in a two or three-dimensional map, a variation of Stochastic Neighbor Embedding that is much easier to optimize, and produces significantly better visualizations by reducing the tendency to crowd points together in the center of the map.
Abstract: We present a new technique called “t-SNE” that visualizes high-dimensional data by giving each datapoint a location in a two or three-dimensional map. The technique is a variation of Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (Hinton and Roweis, 2002) that is much easier to optimize, and produces significantly better visualizations by reducing the tendency to crowd points together in the center of the map. t-SNE is better than existing techniques at creating a single map that reveals structure at many different scales. This is particularly important for high-dimensional data that lie on several different, but related, low-dimensional manifolds, such as images of objects from multiple classes seen from multiple viewpoints. For visualizing the structure of very large datasets, we show how t-SNE can use random walks on neighborhood graphs to allow the implicit structure of all of the data to influence the way in which a subset of the data is displayed. We illustrate the performance of t-SNE on a wide variety of datasets and compare it with many other non-parametric visualization techniques, including Sammon mapping, Isomap, and Locally Linear Embedding. The visualizations produced by t-SNE are significantly better than those produced by the other techniques on almost all of the datasets.
30,124 citations
TL;DR: In this article, an effective way of initializing the weights that allows deep autoencoder networks to learn low-dimensional codes that work much better than principal components analysis as a tool to reduce the dimensionality of data is described.
Abstract: High-dimensional data can be converted to low-dimensional codes by training a multilayer neural network with a small central layer to reconstruct high-dimensional input vectors. Gradient descent can be used for fine-tuning the weights in such "autoencoder" networks, but this works well only if the initial weights are close to a good solution. We describe an effective way of initializing the weights that allows deep autoencoder networks to learn low-dimensional codes that work much better than principal components analysis as a tool to reduce the dimensionality of data.
16,717 citations