39 research outputs found
Progressive Neural Networks
Learning to solve complex sequences of tasks--while both leveraging transfer
and avoiding catastrophic forgetting--remains a key obstacle to achieving
human-level intelligence. The progressive networks approach represents a step
forward in this direction: they are immune to forgetting and can leverage prior
knowledge via lateral connections to previously learned features. We evaluate
this architecture extensively on a wide variety of reinforcement learning tasks
(Atari and 3D maze games), and show that it outperforms common baselines based
on pretraining and finetuning. Using a novel sensitivity measure, we
demonstrate that transfer occurs at both low-level sensory and high-level
control layers of the learned policy
Tell me why! Explanations support learning relational and causal structure
Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a
major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans,
language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role
in overcoming this challenge. Here, we show that language can play a similar
role for deep RL agents in complex environments. While agents typically
struggle to acquire relational and causal knowledge, augmenting their
experience by training them to predict language descriptions and explanations
can overcome these limitations. We show that language can help agents learn
challenging relational tasks, and examine which aspects of language contribute
to its benefits. We then show that explanations can help agents to infer not
only relational but also causal structure. Language can shape the way that
agents to generalize out-of-distribution from ambiguous, causally-confounded
training, and explanations even allow agents to learn to perform experimental
interventions to identify causal relationships. Our results suggest that
language description and explanation may be powerful tools for improving agent
learning and generalization.Comment: ICML 2022; 23 page
Communications Biophysics
Contains research objectives and reports on six research projects split into three sections.National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 P01 NS13126-07)National Institutes of Health (Training Grant 5 T32 NS07047-05)National Institutes of Health (Training Grant 2 T32 NS07047-06)National Science Foundation (Grant BNS 77-16861)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 R01 NS1284606)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 T32 NS07099)National Science Foundation (Grant BNS77-21751)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 R01 NS14092-04)Gallaudet College SubcontractKarmazin Foundation through the Council for the Arts at M.I.T.National Institutes of Health (Grant 1 R01 NS1691701A1)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 R01 NS11080-06)National Institutes of Health (Grant GM-21189