KL-regularized reinforcement learning from expert demonstrations has proved successful in improving the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, allowing them to be applied to challenging physical real-world tasks. However, we show that KL-regularized reinforcement learning with behavioral reference policies derived from expert demonstrations can suffer from pathological training dynamics that can lead to slow, unstable, and suboptimal online learning. We show empirically that the pathology occurs for commonly chosen behavioral policy classes and demonstrate its impact on sample efficiency and online policy performance. Finally, we show that the pathology can be remedied by non-parametric behavioral reference policies and that this allows KL-regularized reinforcement learning to significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches on a variety of challenging locomotion and dexterous hand manipulation tasks.

人工智能的最新趋势是将验证的模型用于语言和视觉任务，这些模型已经实现了非凡的表现，但也令人困惑。因此，以各种方式探索这些模型的能力对该领域至关重要。在本文中，我们探讨了模型的可靠性，在其中我们将可靠的模型定义为一个不仅可以实现强大的预测性能，而且在许多涉及不确定性（例如选择性预测，开放式设置识别）的决策任务上，在许多决策任务上表现出色，而且表现良好。强大的概括（例如，准确性和适当的评分规则，例如在分布数据集中和分发数据集上的对数可能性）和适应性（例如，主动学习，几乎没有射击不确定性）。我们设计了40个数据集的10种任务类型，以评估视觉和语言域上可靠性的不同方面。为了提高可靠性，我们分别开发了VIT-PLEX和T5-PLEX，分别针对视觉和语言方式扩展了大型模型。 PLEX极大地改善了跨可靠性任务的最先进，并简化了传统协议，因为它可以改善开箱即用的性能，并且不需要设计分数或为每个任务调整模型。我们演示了高达1B参数的模型尺寸的缩放效果，并预处理数据集大小最多4B示例。我们还展示了PLEX在具有挑战性的任务上的功能，包括零射门的开放式识别，主动学习和对话语言理解中的不确定性。

离线强化学习在利用大型预采用的数据集进行政策学习方面表现出了巨大的希望，使代理商可以放弃经常廉价的在线数据收集。但是，迄今为止，离线强化学习的探索相对较小，并且缺乏对剩余挑战所在的何处的了解。在本文中，我们试图建立简单的基线以在视觉域中连续控制。我们表明，对两个基于最先进的在线增强学习算法，Dreamerv2和DRQ-V2进行了简单的修改，足以超越事先工作并建立竞争性的基准。我们在现有的离线数据集中对这些算法进行了严格的评估，以及从视觉观察结果中进行离线强化学习的新测试台，更好地代表现实世界中离线增强学习问题中存在的数据分布，并开放我们的代码和数据以促进此方面的进度重要领域。最后，我们介绍并分析了来自视觉观察的离线RL所独有的几个关键Desiderata，包括视觉分散注意力和动态视觉上可识别的变化。

对不确定度和鲁棒性的高质量估计对于众多现实世界的应用来说至关重要，特别是对于深入学习，这是利用许多部署的ML系统。因此，比较改善这些估计的技术的能力对于研究和实践相似非常重要。然而，由于一系列原因，通常缺乏方法的竞争比较，包括：计算广泛调整的可用性，加入足够多的基线，以及用于再现性的具体文件。在本文中，我们介绍了不确定性的基线：在各种任务中的标准和最先进的深度学习方法的高质量实现。从本撰写中，集合跨越9项方法，每个方法都有至少5个度量。每个基线都是一个独立的实验管道，易于可重复使用和可伸缩的部件。我们的目标是提供具有新方法或应用的实验的即时出发点。此外，我们还提供模型检查点，实验输出为Python笔记本，以及用于比较结果的排行榜。代码在https://github.com/google/uncertainty-baselines。

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the task, but also provide sufficient shaping to accomplish it. In this paper, we view reinforcement learning as inferring policies that achieve desired outcomes, rather than as a problem of maximizing rewards. To solve this inference problem, we establish a novel variational inference formulation that allows us to derive a well-shaped reward function which can be learned directly from environment interactions. From the corresponding variational objective, we also derive a new probabilistic Bellman backup operator and use it to develop an off-policy algorithm to solve goal-directed tasks. We empirically demonstrate that this method eliminates the need to hand-craft reward functions for a suite of diverse manipulation and locomotion tasks and leads to effective goal-directed behaviors.

尽管近期因因果推断领域的进展，迄今为止没有关于从观察数据的收集治疗效应估算的方法。对临床实践的结果是，当缺乏随机试验的结果时，没有指导在真实情景中似乎有效的指导。本文提出了一种务实的方法，以获得从观察性研究的治疗效果的初步但稳健地估算，为前线临床医生提供对其治疗策略的信心程度。我们的研究设计适用于一个公开问题，估算Covid-19密集护理患者的拳击机动的治疗效果。

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

Three main points: 1. Data Science (DS) will be increasingly important to heliophysics; 2. Methods of heliophysics science discovery will continually evolve, requiring the use of learning technologies [e.g., machine learning (ML)] that are applied rigorously and that are capable of supporting discovery; and 3. To grow with the pace of data, technology, and workforce changes, heliophysics requires a new approach to the representation of knowledge.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Since early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there has been interest in using artificial intelligence methods to predict COVID-19 infection status based on vocal audio signals, for example cough recordings. However, existing studies have limitations in terms of data collection and of the assessment of the performances of the proposed predictive models. This paper rigorously assesses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques used to predict COVID-19 infection status based on vocal audio signals, using a dataset collected by the UK Health Security Agency. This dataset includes acoustic recordings and extensive study participant meta-data. We provide guidelines on testing the performance of methods to classify COVID-19 infection status based on acoustic features and we discuss how these can be extended more generally to the development and assessment of predictive methods based on public health datasets.