Advancements in Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Strategy Games and Industry Applications

FlashRL: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Flash Games

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a research area that has blossomed tremendously in recent years and has shown remarkable potential in among others successfully playing computer games. However, there only exists a few game platforms that provide diversity in tasks and state-space needed to advance RL algorithms. The existing platforms offer RL access to Atari- and a few web-based games, but no platform fully expose access to Flash games. This is unfortunate because applying RL to Flash games have potential to push the research of RL algorithms. This paper introduces the Flash Reinforcement Learning platform (FlashRL) which attempts to fill this gap by providing an environment for thousands of…

Increasing sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning using generative environment modelling

MapAI: Precision in BuildingSegmentation

MapAI: Precision in Building Segmentation is a competition arranged with the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium (NORA) in collaboration with Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research at the University of Agder (CAIR), the Norwegian Mapping Authority, AI:Hub, Norkart, and the Danish Agency for Data Supply and Infrastructure. The competition will be held in the fall of 2022. It will be concluded at the Northern Lights Deep Learning conference focusing on the segmentation of buildings using aerial images and laser data. We propose two different tasks to segment buildings, where the first task can only utilize aerial images, while the second must use laser data (LiDAR) with…

Towards safe reinforcement-learning in industrial grid-warehousing

Abstract Reinforcement learning has shown to be profoundly successful at learning optimal policies for simulated environments using distributed training with extensive compute capacity. Model-free reinforcement learning uses the notion of trial and error, where the error is a vital part of learning the agent to behave optimally. In mission-critical, real-world environments, there is little tolerance for failure and can cause damaging effects on humans and equipment. In these environments, current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches are not sufficient to learn optimal control policies safely. On the other hand, model-based reinforcement learning tries to encode environment tra…

Towards a Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Tower Line Wars

There have been numerous breakthroughs with reinforcement learning in the recent years, perhaps most notably on Deep Reinforcement Learning successfully playing and winning relatively advanced computer games. There is undoubtedly an anticipation that Deep Reinforcement Learning will play a major role when the first AI masters the complicated game plays needed to beat a professional Real-Time Strategy game player. For this to be possible, there needs to be a game environment that targets and fosters AI research, and specifically Deep Reinforcement Learning. Some game environments already exist, however, these are either overly simplistic such as Atari 2600 or complex such as Starcraft II fro…

Towards a Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Tower Line Wars

There have been numerous breakthroughs with reinforcement learning in the recent years, perhaps most notably on Deep Reinforcement Learning successfully playing and winning relatively advanced computer games. There is undoubtedly an anticipation that Deep Reinforcement Learning will play a major role when the first AI masters the complicated game plays needed to beat a professional Real-Time Strategy game player. For this to be possible, there needs to be a game environment that targets and fosters AI research, and specifically Deep Reinforcement Learning. Some game environments already exist, however, these are either overly simplistic such as Atari 2600 or complex such as Starcraft II fro…

The Dreaming Variational Autoencoder for Reinforcement Learning Environments

Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in generalizing over raw sensory data using only a single neural network for value optimization. There are several challenges in the current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms that prevent them from converging towards the global optima. It is likely that the solution to these problems lies in short- and long-term planning, exploration and memory management for reinforcement learning algorithms. Games are often used to benchmark reinforcement learning algorithms as they provide a flexible, reproducible, and easy to control environment. Regardless, few games feature a state-space where results in exploration, memory, and plannin…

The Dreaming Variational Autoencoder for Reinforcement Learning Environments

Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in generalizing over raw sensory data using only a single neural network for value optimization. There are several challenges in the current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms that prevent them from converging towards the global optima. It is likely that the solution to these problems lies in short- and long-term planning, exploration and memory management for reinforcement learning algorithms. Games are often used to benchmark reinforcement learning algorithms as they provide a flexible, reproducible, and easy to control environment. Regardless, few games feature a state-space where results in exploration, memory, and plannin…

Development of a Novel Object Detection System Based on Synthetic Data Generated from Unreal Game Engine

This paper presents a novel approach to training a real-world object detection system based on synthetic data utilizing state-of-the-art technologies. Training an object detection system can be challenging and time-consuming as machine learning requires substantial volumes of training data with associated metadata. Synthetic data can solve this by providing unlimited desired training data with automatic generation. However, the main challenge is creating a balanced dataset that closes the reality gap and generalizes well when deployed in the real world. A state-of-the-art game engine, Unreal Engine 4, was used to approach the challenge of generating a photorealistic dataset for deep learnin…

CostNet: An End-to-End Framework for Goal-Directed Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as \(\epsilon \)-greedy. There are two approaches, model-based and model-free reinforcement learning, that show concrete results in several disciplines. Model-based RL learns a model of the environment for learning the policy while model-free approaches are fully explorative and exploitative without considering the underlying environment dynamics. Model-free RL works conceptually well in simulated environments, and empirical evidence suggests that trial and error lead to a near-opti…

Contrastive Transformer: Contrastive Learning Scheme with Transformer innate Patches

This paper presents Contrastive Transformer, a contrastive learning scheme using the Transformer innate patches. Contrastive Transformer enables existing contrastive learning techniques, often used for image classification, to benefit dense downstream prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. The scheme performs supervised patch-level contrastive learning, selecting the patches based on the ground truth mask, subsequently used for hard-negative and hard-positive sampling. The scheme applies to all vision-transformer architectures, is easy to implement, and introduces minimal additional memory footprint. Additionally, the scheme removes the need for huge batch sizes, as each patch is t…

Safer Reinforcement Learning for Agents in Industrial Grid-Warehousing

In mission-critical, real-world environments, there is typically a low threshold for failure, which makes interaction with learning algorithms particularly challenging. Here, current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms struggle to learn optimal control policies safely. Loss of control follows, which could result in equipment breakages and even personal injuries.

Adaptive Task Assignment in Online Learning Environments

With the increasing popularity of online learning, intelligent tutoring systems are regaining increased attention. In this paper, we introduce adaptive algorithms for personalized assignment of learning tasks to student so that to improve his performance in online learning environments. As main contribution of this paper, we propose a a novel Skill-Based Task Selector (SBTS) algorithm which is able to approximate a student's skill level based on his performance and consequently suggest adequate assignments. The SBTS is inspired by the class of multi-armed bandit algorithms. However, in contrast to standard multi-armed bandit approaches, the SBTS aims at acquiring two criteria related to stu…

Deep RTS: A Game Environment for Deep Reinforcement Learning in Real-Time Strategy Games

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of research that has blossomed tremendously in recent years and has shown remarkable potential for artificial intelligence based opponents in computer games. This success is primarily due to the vast capabilities of convolutional neural networks, that can extract useful features from noisy and complex data. Games are excellent tools to test and push the boundaries of novel RL algorithms because they give valuable insight into how well an algorithm can perform in isolated environments without the real-life consequences. Real-time strategy games (RTS) is a genre that has tremendous complexity and challenges the player in short and long-term planning. The…

Deep Q-Learning With Q-Matrix Transfer Learning for Novel Fire Evacuation Environment

We focus on the important problem of emergency evacuation, which clearly could benefit from reinforcement learning that has been largely unaddressed. Emergency evacuation is a complex task which is difficult to solve with reinforcement learning, since an emergency situation is highly dynamic, with a lot of changing variables and complex constraints that makes it difficult to train on. In this paper, we propose the first fire evacuation environment to train reinforcement learning agents for evacuation planning. The environment is modelled as a graph capturing the building structure. It consists of realistic features like fire spread, uncertainty and bottlenecks. We have implemented the envir…

Deep Reinforcement Learning using Capsules in Advanced Game Environments

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a research area that has blossomed tremendously in recent years and has shown remarkable potential for artificial intelligence based opponents in computer games. This success is primarily due to vast capabilities of Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNet), enabling algorithms to extract useful information from noisy environments. Capsule Network (CapsNet) is a recent introduction to the Deep Learning algorithm group and has only barely begun to be explored. The network is an architecture for image classification, with superior performance for classification of the MNIST dataset. CapsNets have not been explored beyond image classification. This thesis introduce…

Deep Reinforcement Learning using Capsules in Advanced Game Environments

Master's thesis Information- and communication technology IKT590 - University of Agder 2017 Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a research area that has blossomed tremendously in recent years and has shown remarkable potential for arti cial intelligence based opponents in computer games. This success is primarily due to vast capabilities of Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNet), enabling algorithms to extract useful information from noisy environments. Capsule Network (CapsNet) is a recent introduction to the Deep Learning algorithm group and has only barely begun to be explored. The network is an architecture for image classi cation, with superior performance for classi cation of the MNIST da…

Towards Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Industry-near Environments

Deep reinforcement learning has over the past few years shown great potential in learning near-optimal control in complex simulated environments with little visible information. Rainbow (Q-Learning) and PPO (Policy Optimisation) have shown outstanding performance in a variety of tasks, including Atari 2600, MuJoCo, and Roboschool test suite. While these algorithms are fundamentally different, both suffer from high variance, low sample efficiency, and hyperparameter sensitivity that in practice, make these algorithms a no-go for critical operations in the industry. On the other hand, model-based reinforcement learning focuses on learning the transition dynamics between states in an environme…

Towards Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Industry-Near Environments

Deep reinforcement learning has over the past few years shown great potential in learning near-optimal control in complex simulated environments with little visible information. Rainbow (Q-Learning) and PPO (Policy Optimisation) have shown outstanding performance in a variety of tasks, including Atari 2600, MuJoCo, and Roboschool test suite. Although these algorithms are fundamentally different, both suffer from high variance, low sample efficiency, and hyperparameter sensitivity that, in practice, make these algorithms a no-go for critical operations in the industry.

Interpretable Option Discovery Using Deep Q-Learning and Variational Autoencoders

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is unquestionably a robust framework to train autonomous agents in a wide variety of disciplines. However, traditional deep and shallow model-free RL algorithms suffer from low sample efficiency and inadequate generalization for sparse state spaces. The options framework with temporal abstractions [18] is perhaps the most promising method to solve these problems, but it still has noticeable shortcomings. It only guarantees local convergence, and it is challenging to automate initiation and termination conditions, which in practice are commonly hand-crafted.