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We demonstrate the first large-scale application of model-based generative adversarial imitation learning (MGAIL) to the task of dense urban self-driving. We augment standard MGAIL using a hierarchical model to enable generalization to arbitrary goal routes, and measure performance using a closed-loop evaluation framework with simulated interactive agents. We train policies from expert trajectories collected from real vehicles driving over 100,000 miles in San Francisco, and demonstrate a steerable policy that can navigate robustly even in a zero-shot setting, generalizing to synthetic scenarios with novel goals that never occurred in real-world driving. We also demonstrate the importance of mixing closed-loop MGAIL losses with open-loop behavior cloning losses, and show our best policy approaches the performance of the expert. We evaluate our imitative model in both average and challenging scenarios, and show how it can serve as a useful prior to plan successful trajectories., IROS 2022

Unsupervised extraction of objects from low-level visual data is an important goal for further progress in machine learning. Existing approaches for representing objects without labels use structured generative models with static images. These methods focus a large amount of their capacity on reconstructing unimportant background pixels, missing low contrast or small objects. Conversely, we present a new method that avoids losses in pixel space and over-reliance on the limited signal a static image provides. Our approach takes advantage of objects' motion by learning a discriminative, time-contrastive loss in the space of slot representations, attempting to force each slot to not only capture entities that move, but capture distinct objects from the other slots. Moreover, we introduce a new quantitative evaluation metric to measure how "diverse" a set of slot vectors are, and use it to evaluate our model on 20 Atari games., Presented at ICML 2020 Workshop: Object-Oriented Learning (OOL): Perception, Representation, and Reasoning

Extraire une représentation de tous les facteurs de haut niveau de l'état d'un agent à partir d'informations sensorielles de bas niveau est une tâche importante, mais difficile, dans l'apprentissage automatique. Dans ce memoire, nous explorerons plusieurs approches non supervisées pour apprendre ces représentations. Nous appliquons et analysons des méthodes d'apprentissage de représentations non supervisées existantes dans des environnements d'apprentissage par renforcement, et nous apportons notre propre suite d'évaluations et notre propre méthode novatrice d'apprentissage de représentations d'état. Dans le premier chapitre de ce travail, nous passerons en revue et motiverons l'apprentissage non supervisé de représentations pour l'apprentissage automatique en général et pour l'apprentissage par renforcement. Nous introduirons ensuite un sous-domaine relativement nouveau de l'apprentissage de représentations : l'apprentissage auto-supervisé. Nous aborderons ensuite deux approches fondamentales de l'apprentissage de représentations, les méthodes génératives et les méthodes discriminatives. Plus précisément, nous nous concentrerons sur une collection de méthodes discriminantes d'apprentissage de représentations, appelées méthodes contrastives d'apprentissage de représentations non supervisées (CURL). Nous terminerons le premier chapitre en détaillant diverses approches pour évaluer l'utilité des représentations. Dans le deuxième chapitre, nous présenterons un article de workshop dans lequel nous évaluons un ensemble de méthodes d'auto-supervision standards pour les problèmes d'apprentissage par renforcement. Nous découvrons que la performance de ces représentations dépend fortement de la dynamique et de la structure de l'environnement. À ce titre, nous déterminons qu'une étude plus systématique des environnements et des méthodes est nécessaire. Notre troisième chapitre couvre notre deuxième article, Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari, où nous essayons d'effectuer une étude plus approfondie des méthodes d'apprentissage de représentations en apprentissage par renforcement, comme expliqué dans le deuxième chapitre. Pour faciliter une évaluation plus approfondie des représentations en apprentissage par renforcement, nous introduisons une suite de 22 jeux Atari entièrement labellisés. De plus, nous choisissons de comparer les méthodes d'apprentissage de représentations de façon plus systématique, en nous concentrant sur une comparaison entre méthodes génératives et méthodes contrastives, plutôt que les méthodes générales du deuxième chapitre choisies de façon moins systématique. Enfin, nous introduisons une nouvelle méthode contrastive, ST-DIM, qui excelle sur ces 22 jeux Atari., Extracting a representation of all the high-level factors of an agent’s state from level-level sensory information is an important, but challenging task in machine learning. In this thesis, we will explore several unsupervised approaches for learning these state representations. We apply and analyze existing unsupervised representation learning methods in reinforcement learning environments, as well as contribute our own evaluation benchmark and our own novel state representation learning method. In the first chapter, we will overview and motivate unsupervised representation learning for machine learning in general and for reinforcement learning. We will then introduce a relatively new subfield of representation learning: self-supervised learning. We will then cover two core representation learning approaches, generative methods and discriminative methods. Specifically, we will focus on a collection of discriminative representation learning methods called contrastive unsupervised representation learning (CURL) methods. We will close the first chapter by detailing various approaches for evaluating the usefulness of representations. In the second chapter, we will present a workshop paper, where we evaluate a handful of off-the-shelf self-supervised methods in reinforcement learning problems. We discover that the performance of these representations depends heavily on the dynamics and visual structure of the environment. As such, we determine that a more systematic study of environments and methods is required. Our third chapter covers our second article, Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari, where we try to execute a more thorough study of representation learning methods in RL as motivated by the second chapter. To facilitate a more thorough evaluation of representations in RL we introduce a benchmark of 22 fully labelled Atari games. In addition, we choose the representation learning methods for comparison in a more systematic way by focusing on comparing generative methods with contrastive methods, instead of the less systematically chosen off-the-shelf methods from the second chapter. Finally, we introduce a new contrastive method, ST-DIM, which excels at the 22 Atari games.

Deep model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has the potential to substantially improve the sample-efficiency of deep RL. While various challenges have long held it back, a number of papers have recently come out reporting success with deep model-based methods. This is a great development, but the lack of a consistent metric to evaluate such methods makes it difficult to compare various approaches. For example, the common single-task sample-efficiency metric conflates improvements due to model-based learning with various other aspects, such as representation learning, making it difficult to assess true progress on model-based RL. To address this, we introduce an experimental setup to evaluate model-based behavior of RL methods, inspired by work from neuroscience on detecting model-based behavior in humans and animals. Our metric based on this setup, the Local Change Adaptation (LoCA) regret, measures how quickly an RL method adapts to a local change in the environment. Our metric can identify model-based behavior, even if the method uses a poor representation and provides insight in how close a method's behavior is from optimal model-based behavior. We use our setup to evaluate the model-based behavior of MuZero on a variation of the classic Mountain Car task., Comment: NeurIPS 2020, code: https://github.com/chandar-lab/LoCA

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision from rewards is a challenging open problem. We introduce a method that learns state representations by maximizing mutual information across spatially and temporally distinct features of a neural encoder of the observations. We also introduce a new benchmark based on Atari 2600 games where we evaluate representations based on how well they capture the ground truth state variables. We believe this new framework for evaluating representation learning models will be crucial for future representation learning research. Finally, we compare our technique with other state-of-the-art generative and contrastive representation learning methods. The code associated with this work is available at https://github.com/mila-iqia/atari-representation-learning, NeurIPS 2019; v6 fixes a broken figure reference

Self-supervised methods, wherein an agent learns representations solely by observing the results of its actions, become crucial in environments which do not provide a dense reward signal or have labels. In most cases, such methods are used for pretraining or auxiliary tasks for "downstream" tasks, such as control, exploration, or imitation learning. However, it is not clear which method's representations best capture meaningful features of the environment, and which are best suited for which types of environments. We present a small-scale study of self-supervised methods on two visual environments: Flappy Bird and Sonic The Hedgehog. In particular, we quantitatively evaluate the representations learned from these tasks in two contexts: a) the extent to which the representations capture true state information of the agent and b) how generalizable these representations are to novel situations, like new levels and textures. Lastly, we evaluate these self-supervised features by visualizing which parts of the environment they focus on. Our results show that the utility of the representations is highly dependent on the visuals and dynamics of the environment., Comment: Accepted to the 2019 ICML Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning

Then detection and identification of extreme weather events in large-scale climate simulations is an important problem for risk management, informing governmental policy decisions and advancing our basic understanding of the climate system. Recent work has shown that fully supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can yield acceptable accuracy for classifying well-known types of extreme weather events when large amounts of labeled data are available. However, many different types of spatially localized climate patterns are of interest including hurricanes, extra-tropical cyclones, weather fronts, and blocking events among others. Existing labeled data for these patterns can be incomplete in various ways, such as covering only certain years or geographic areas and having false negatives. This type of climate data therefore poses a number of interesting machine learning challenges. We present a multichannel spatiotemporal CNN architecture for semi-supervised bounding box prediction and exploratory data analysis. We demonstrate that our approach is able to leverage temporal information and unlabeled data to improve the localization of extreme weather events. Further, we explore the representations learned by our model in order to better understand this important data. We present a dataset, ExtremeWeather, to encourage machine learning research in this area and to help facilitate further work in understanding and mitigating the effects of climate change. The dataset is available at extremeweatherdataset.github.io and the code is available at https://github.com/eracah/hur-detect.

Detecting extreme events in large datasets is a major challenge in climate science research. Current algorithms for extreme event detection are build upon human expertise in defining events based on subjective thresholds of relevant physical variables. Often, multiple competing methods produce vastly different results on the same dataset. Accurate characterization of extreme events in climate simulations and observational data archives is critical for understanding the trends and potential impacts of such events in a climate change content. This study presents the first application of Deep Learning techniques as alternative methodology for climate extreme events detection. Deep neural networks are able to learn high-level representations of a broad class of patterns from labeled data. In this work, we developed deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classification system and demonstrated the usefulness of Deep Learning technique for tackling climate pattern detection problems. Coupled with Bayesian based hyper-parameter optimization scheme, our deep CNN system achieves 89\%-99\% of accuracy in detecting extreme events (Tropical Cyclones, Atmospheric Rivers and Weather Fronts

We explore the trade-offs of performing linear algebra using Apache Spark, compared to traditional C and MPI implementations on HPC platforms. Spark is designed for data analytics on cluster computing platforms with access to local disks and is optimized for data-parallel tasks. We examine three widely-used and important matrix factorizations: NMF (for physical plausability), PCA (for its ubiquity) and CX (for data interpretability). We apply these methods to TB-sized problems in particle physics, climate modeling and bioimaging. The data matrices are tall-and-skinny which enable the algorithms to map conveniently into Spark's data-parallel model. We perform scaling experiments on up to 1600 Cray XC40 nodes, describe the sources of slowdowns, and provide tuning guidance to obtain high performance.