Continuous coordination as a realistic scenario for lifelong learning

Les algorithmes actuels d'apprentissage profond par renforcement (RL) sont encore très spécifiques à leur tâche et n'ont pas la capacité de généraliser à de nouveaux environnements. L'apprentissage tout au long de la vie (LLL), cependant, vise à résoudre plusieurs tâches de manière séquentielle en transférant et en utilisant efficacement les connaissances entre les tâches. Malgré un regain d'intérêt pour le RL tout au long de la vie ces dernières années, l'absence d'un banc de test réaliste rend difficile une évaluation robuste des algorithmes d'apprentissage tout au long de la vie. Le RL multi-agents (MARL), d'autre part, peut être considérée comme un scénario naturel pour le RL tout au long de la vie en raison de sa non-stationnarité inhérente, puisque les politiques des agents changent avec le temps. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons un banc de test multi-agents d'apprentissage tout au long de la vie qui prend en charge un paramétrage à la fois zéro et quelques-coups. Notre configuration est basée sur Hanabi - un jeu multi-agents partiellement observable et entièrement coopératif qui s'est avéré difficile pour la coordination zéro coup. Son vaste espace stratégique en fait un environnement souhaitable pour les tâches RL tout au long de la vie. Nous évaluons plusieurs méthodes MARL récentes et comparons des algorithmes d'apprentissage tout au long de la vie de pointe dans des régimes de mémoire et de calcul limités pour faire la lumière sur leurs forces et leurs faiblesses. Ce paradigme d'apprentissage continu nous fournit également une manière pragmatique d'aller au-delà de la formation centralisée qui est le protocole de formation le plus couramment utilisé dans MARL. Nous montrons empiriquement que les agents entraînés dans notre environnement sont capables de bien se coordonner avec des agents inconnus, sans aucune hypothèse supplémentaire faite par des travaux précédents. Mots-clés: le RL multi-agents, l'apprentissage tout au long de la vie.Current deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are still highly task-specific and lack the ability to generalize to new environments. Lifelong learning (LLL), however, aims at solving multiple tasks sequentially by efficiently transferring and using knowledge between tasks. Despite a surge of interest in lifelong RL in recent years, the lack of a realistic testbed makes robust evaluation of lifelong learning algorithms difficult. Multi-agent RL (MARL), on the other hand, can be seen as a natural scenario for lifelong RL due to its inherent non-stationarity, since the agents' policies change over time. In this thesis, we introduce a multi-agent lifelong learning testbed that supports both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our setup is based on Hanabi --- a partially-observable, fully cooperative multi-agent game that has been shown to be challenging for zero-shot coordination. Its large strategy space makes it a desirable environment for lifelong RL tasks. We evaluate several recent MARL methods, and benchmark state-of-the-art lifelong learning algorithms in limited memory and computation regimes to shed light on their strengths and weaknesses. This continual learning paradigm also provides us with a pragmatic way of going beyond centralized training which is the most commonly used training protocol in MARL. We empirically show that the agents trained in our setup are able to coordinate well with unknown agents, without any additional assumptions made by previous works. Key words: multi-agent reinforcement learning, lifelong learning

Continuous Coordination As a Realistic Scenario for Lifelong Learning

Current deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are still highly task-specific and lack the ability to generalize to new environments. Lifelong learning (LLL), however, aims at solving multiple tasks sequentially by efficiently transferring and using knowledge between tasks. Despite a surge of interest in lifelong RL in recent years, the lack of a realistic testbed makes robust evaluation of LLL algorithms difficult. Multi-agent RL (MARL), on the other hand, can be seen as a natural scenario for lifelong RL due to its inherent non-stationarity, since the agents' policies change over time. In this work, we introduce a multi-agent lifelong learning testbed that supports both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our setup is based on Hanabi -- a partially-observable, fully cooperative multi-agent game that has been shown to be challenging for zero-shot coordination. Its large strategy space makes it a desirable environment for lifelong RL tasks. We evaluate several recent MARL methods, and benchmark state-of-the-art LLL algorithms in limited memory and computation regimes to shed light on their strengths and weaknesses. This continual learning paradigm also provides us with a pragmatic way of going beyond centralized training which is the most commonly used training protocol in MARL. We empirically show that the agents trained in our setup are able to coordinate well with unseen agents, without any additional assumptions made by previous works. The code and all pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/Lifelong-Hanabi.Comment: 19 pages with supplementary materials. Added results for Lifelong RL methods and some future work. Accepted to ICML 202

PatchUp: A Regularization Technique for Convolutional Neural Networks

Large capacity deep learning models are often prone to a high generalization gap when trained with a limited amount of labeled training data. A recent class of methods to address this problem uses various ways to construct a new training sample by mixing a pair (or more) of training samples. We propose PatchUp, a hidden state block-level regularization technique for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), that is applied on selected contiguous blocks of feature maps from a random pair of samples. Our approach improves the robustness of CNN models against the manifold intrusion problem that may occur in other state-of-the-art mixing approaches like Mixup and CutMix. Moreover, since we are mixing the contiguous block of features in the hidden space, which has more dimensions than the input space, we obtain more diverse samples for training towards different dimensions. Our experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN datasets with PreactResnet18, PreactResnet34, and WideResnet-28-10 models show that PatchUp improves upon, or equals, the performance of current state-of-the-art regularizers for CNNs. We also show that PatchUp can provide better generalization to affine transformations of samples and is more robust against adversarial attacks

When Polyhedral Optimizations Meet Deep Learning Kernels

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are well understood to be one of the largest consumers of HPC resources and efficiently running their training and inference phases on modern heterogeneous architectures (and accelerators) poses an important challenge for the compilation community. Currently, DNNs are actively being studied by the automatic parallelization and polyhedral compilation communities for the same purpose. In this (initial) paper, we study the kernels of four varieties of DNN layers with the goal of applying automatic parallelization techniques for latest architectures. We show the affine (Polyhedral) nature of these kernels thereby showing that they are amenable to well known polyhedral compilation techniques. For benchmarking purposes, we implemented forward and backward kernels for four varieties of layers namely convo-lutional, pooling, recurrent and long short term memory in PolyBench/C, A well known polyhedral benchmarking suite. We also evaluated our kernels on the state-of-art Pluto polyhedral compiler in order to highlight the speedups obtained by automatic loop transformations

Dealing With Non-stationarity in Decentralized Cooperative Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning via Multi-Timescale Learning

Decentralized cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) can be a versatile learning framework, particularly in scenarios where centralized training is either not possible or not practical. One of the critical challenges in decentralized deep MARL is the non-stationarity of the learning environment when multiple agents are learning concurrently. A commonly used and efficient scheme for decentralized MARL is independent learning in which agents concurrently update their policies independently of each other. We first show that independent learning does not always converge, while sequential learning where agents update their policies one after another in a sequence is guaranteed to converge to an agent-by-agent optimal solution. In sequential learning, when one agent updates its policy, all other agent's policies are kept fixed, alleviating the challenge of non-stationarity due to simultaneous updates in other agents' policies. However, it can be slow because only one agent is learning at any time. Therefore it might also not always be practical. In this work, we propose a decentralized cooperative MARL algorithm based on multi-timescale learning. In multi-timescale learning, all agents learn simultaneously, but at different learning rates. In our proposed method, when one agent updates its policy, other agents are allowed to update their policies as well, but at a slower rate. This speeds up sequential learning, while also minimizing non-stationarity caused by other agents updating concurrently. Multi-timescale learning outperforms state-of-the-art decentralized learning methods on a set of challenging multi-agent cooperative tasks in the epymarl(Papoudakis et al., 2020) benchmark. This can be seen as a first step towards more general decentralized cooperative deep MARL methods based on multi-timescale learning