RL Unplugged: Benchmarks for Offline Reinforcement Learning

We propose a benchmark called RL Unplugged to evaluate and compare offline RL methods. RL Unplugged includes data from a diverse range of domains including games (e.g., Atari benchmark) and simulated motor control problems (e.g. DM Control Suite). The datasets include domains that are partially or fully observable, use continuous or discrete actions, and have stochastic vs. deterministic dynamics.Read More

Acme: A new framework for distributed reinforcement learning

Acme is a framework for building readable, efficient, research-oriented RL algorithms. At its core Acme is designed to enable simple descriptions of RL agents that can be run at various scales of execution — including distributed agents. By releasing Acme, our aim is to make the results of various RL algorithms developed in academia and industrial labs easier to reproduce and extend for the machine learning community at large.Read More

Using AI to predict retinal disease progression

Vision loss among the elderly is a major healthcare issue: about one in three people have some vision-reducing disease by the age of 65. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of blindness in the developed world. In Europe, approximately 25% of those 60 and older have AMD. The dry form is relatively common among people over 65, and usually causes only mild sight loss. However, about 15% of patients with dry AMD go on to develop a more serious form of the disease exudative AMD, or exAMD which can result in rapid and permanent loss of sight. Fortunately, there are treatments that can slow further vision loss. Although there are no preventative therapies available at present, these are being explored in clinical trials. The period before the development of exAMD may therefore represent a critical window to target for therapeutic innovations: can we predict which patients will progress to exAMD, and help prevent sight loss before it even occurs?Read More

Simple Sensor Intentions for Exploration

In this paper we focus on a setting in which goal tasks are defined via simple sparse rewards, and exploration is facilitated via agent-internal auxiliary tasks. We introduce the idea of simple sensor intentions (SSIs) as a generic way to define auxiliary tasks. SSIs reduce the amount of prior knowledge that is required to define suitable rewards. They can further be computed directly from raw sensor streams and thus do not require expensive and possibly brittle state estimation on real systems.Read More