60,275 research outputs found
The Dreaming Variational Autoencoder for Reinforcement Learning Environments
Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in generalizing over raw
sensory data using only a single neural network for value optimization. There
are several challenges in the current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning
algorithms that prevent them from converging towards the global optima. It is
likely that the solution to these problems lies in short- and long-term
planning, exploration and memory management for reinforcement learning
algorithms. Games are often used to benchmark reinforcement learning algorithms
as they provide a flexible, reproducible, and easy to control environment.
Regardless, few games feature a state-space where results in exploration,
memory, and planning are easily perceived. This paper presents The Dreaming
Variational Autoencoder (DVAE), a neural network based generative modeling
architecture for exploration in environments with sparse feedback. We further
present Deep Maze, a novel and flexible maze engine that challenges DVAE in
partial and fully-observable state-spaces, long-horizon tasks, and
deterministic and stochastic problems. We show initial findings and encourage
further work in reinforcement learning driven by generative exploration.Comment: Best Student Paper Award, Proceedings of the 38th SGAI International
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge, UK, 2018, Artificial
Intelligence XXXV, 201
Batch Reinforcement Learning on the Industrial Benchmark: First Experiences
The Particle Swarm Optimization Policy (PSO-P) has been recently introduced
and proven to produce remarkable results on interacting with academic
reinforcement learning benchmarks in an off-policy, batch-based setting. To
further investigate the properties and feasibility on real-world applications,
this paper investigates PSO-P on the so-called Industrial Benchmark (IB), a
novel reinforcement learning (RL) benchmark that aims at being realistic by
including a variety of aspects found in industrial applications, like
continuous state and action spaces, a high dimensional, partially observable
state space, delayed effects, and complex stochasticity. The experimental
results of PSO-P on IB are compared to results of closed-form control policies
derived from the model-based Recurrent Control Neural Network (RCNN) and the
model-free Neural Fitted Q-Iteration (NFQ). Experiments show that PSO-P is not
only of interest for academic benchmarks, but also for real-world industrial
applications, since it also yielded the best performing policy in our IB
setting. Compared to other well established RL techniques, PSO-P produced
outstanding results in performance and robustness, requiring only a relatively
low amount of effort in finding adequate parameters or making complex design
decisions
Automated Speed and Lane Change Decision Making using Deep Reinforcement Learning
This paper introduces a method, based on deep reinforcement learning, for
automatically generating a general purpose decision making function. A Deep
Q-Network agent was trained in a simulated environment to handle speed and lane
change decisions for a truck-trailer combination. In a highway driving case, it
is shown that the method produced an agent that matched or surpassed the
performance of a commonly used reference model. To demonstrate the generality
of the method, the exact same algorithm was also tested by training it for an
overtaking case on a road with oncoming traffic. Furthermore, a novel way of
applying a convolutional neural network to high level input that represents
interchangeable objects is also introduced
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