Files
NoteNextra-origin/content/CSE510/CSE510_L2.md
Trance-0 7137d8aca2 update
2025-08-28 12:51:46 -05:00

187 lines
5.0 KiB
Markdown

# CSE510 Deep Reinforcement Learning (Lecture 2)
Introduction and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs)
## What is reinforcement learning (RL)
- A general computational framework for behavior learning through reinforcement/trial and error
- Deep RL: combining deep learning with RL for complex problems
- Showing a promise for artificial general intelligence (AGI)
## What RL can do now.
### Backgammon
#### Neuro-Gammon
Developed by Gerald Tesauro in 1989 in IBM's research center.
Train to mimic expert demonstrations using supervised learning.
Achieved intermediate-level human player.
#### TD-Gammon (Temporal Difference Learning)
Developed by Gerald Tesauro in 1992 in IBM's research center.
A neural network that trains itself to be an evaluation function by playing against itself starting from random weights.
Achieved performance close to top human players of its time.
### DeepMind Atari
Use deep Q-learning to play Atari games.
Without human demonstrations, it can learn to play the game at a superhuman level.
### AlphaGo
Monte Carlo Tree Search, learning policy and value function networks for pruning the search tree, expert demonstrations, self-play, and TPU from Google.
### Video Games
OpenAI Five for Dota 2
won 5v5 best of 3 games against top human players.
Deepmind AlphaStar for StarCraft
supervised training followed by a league competition training.
### AlphaTensor
discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning.
AlphaTensor: 76 vs Strassen's 80 for 5x5 matrix multiplication.
### Training LLMs
For verifiable tasks (coding, math, etc.), RL can be used to train a model to perform the task without human supervision.
### Robotics
Unitree Go, Altlas by Boston Dynamics, etc.
## What are the challenges of RL in real world applications?
Beating the human champion is "easier" than placing the go stones.
### State estimation
Known environments (known entities and dynamics) vs. unknown environments (unknown entities and dynamics).
Need for behaviors to **transfer/generalize** across environmental variations since the real world is very diverse.
> **State estimation**
>
> To be able to act, you need first to be able to **see**, detect the **objects** that you interact with, detect whether you achieved the **goal**.
Most works are between two extremes:
- Assuming the world model known (object locations, shapes, physical properties obtain via AR tags or manual tuning), they use planners to search for the action sequence to achieve a desired goal.
- Do not attempt to detect any objects and learn to map RGB images directly to actions.
Behavior learning is challenging because state estimation is challenging, in other word, because computer vision/perception is challenging.
Interesting direction: **leveraging DRL and vision-language models**
### Efficiency
Cheap vs. Expensive to get experience samples
#### DRL Sample Efficiency
Humans after 15 minutes tend to outperform DDQN after
115 hours
#### Reinforcement Learning in Human
Human appear to learn to act (e.g., walk) through "very few examples" of trial and error. How is an open question...
Possible answers:
- Hardware: 230 million years of bipedal movement data
- Imitation Learning: Observation of other humans walking (e.g., imitation learning, episodic memory and semantic memory)
- Algorithms: Better than backpropagation and stochastic gradient descent
#### Discrete and continuous action spaces
Computation is discrete, but the real action space is continuous.
#### One-goal vs. Multi-goal
Life is a multi-goal problem. Involving infinitely many possible games.
#### Rewards automatic and auto detect rewards
Our curiosity is a reward.
#### And more
- Transfer learning
- Generalization
- Long horizon reasoning
- Model-based RL
- Sparse rewards
- Reward design/learning
- Planning/Learning
- Lifelong learning
- Safety
- Interpretability
- etc.
## What is the course about?
To teach you RL models and algorithms.
- To be able to tackle real world problems.
To excite you about RL.
- To provide a primer for you to launch advanced studies.
Schedule:
- RL Model and basic algorithms
- Markov Decision Process (MDP)
- Passive RL: ADP and TD-learning
- Active RL: Q-Learning and SARSA
- Deep RL algorithms
- Value-Based methods
- Policy Gradient Methods
- Model-Based methods
- Advanced Topics
- Offline RL, Multi-Agent RL, etc.
### Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
#### Model-Based
- Learn the model of the world, then plan using the model
- Update model often
- Re-plan often
#### Value-Based
- Learn the state or state-action value
- Act by choosing best action in state
- Exploration is a necessary add-on
#### Policy-based
- Learn the stochastic policy function that maps state to action
- Act by sampling policy
- Exploration is baked in
#### Better sample efficiency to Less sample efficiency
- Model-Based
- Off-policy/Q-learning
- Actor-critic
- On-policy/Policy gradient
- Evolutionary/Gradient-free
## What is RL?
## RL model: Markov Decision Process (MDP)