Efficient RL via Disentangled Environment and Agent Representations

Agents that are aware of the separation between themselves and their environments can leverage this understanding to form effective representations of visual input. We propose an approach for learning such structured representations for RL algorithms, using visual knowledge of the agent, such as its shape or mask, which is often inexpensive to obtain. This is incorporated into the RL objective using a simple auxiliary loss. We show that our method, Structured Environment-Agent Representations, outperforms state-of-the-art model-free approaches over 18 different challenging visual simulation environments spanning 5 different robots. Website at https://sear-rl.github.io/Comment: ICML 2023. Website at https://sear-rl.github.io

Effect of Hearing Intervention versus Health Education Control on Fatigue: A Secondary Analysis of the ACHIEVE study

BackgroundFatigue is a common complaint among older adults with hearing loss. The impact of addressing hearing loss on fatigue symptoms has not been studied in a randomized controlled trial. In a secondary analysis of the ACHIEVE study, we investigated the effect of hearing intervention versus health education control on 3-year change in fatigue in community-dwelling older adults with hearing loss.MethodsParticipants aged 70-84 years old with untreated hearing loss recruited across 4 study sites in the United States (Forsyth County, NC; Jackson, MS; Minneapolis, MN; Washington County, MD) were randomized (1:1) to hearing intervention or health education control and followed for 3 years. Three-year change in fatigue symptoms was measured by 2 instruments (RAND-36 and PROMIS). We estimated the intervention effect as the difference in the 3-year change in fatigue between intervention and control groups using a linear mixed-effects model under the intention-to-treat principle.ResultsParticipants (n=977) had a mean age (SD) of 76.8 (4.0) years, were 53.5% female and 87.8% White. Over 3 years, a beneficial effect of the hearing intervention versus health education control on fatigue was observed using the RAND-fatigue score (β= -0.12 [95% CI -0.22, -0.02]). Estimates also suggested beneficial effect of hearing intervention on fatigue when measured by the PROMIS fatigue score (β= -0.32 [95% CI -1.15, 0.51]).ConclusionsOur findings suggest that hearing intervention may reduce fatigue over 3 years among older adults with hearing loss