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This is really important work. It's general and operates within a (non-researcher) human attention budget. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) is a great method on it's ow
by iandanforth 7y ago
This is really important work. It's general and operates within a (non-researcher) human attention budget.
Soft Actor Critic (SAC) is a great method on it's own but this human-in-the-loop training for real world problems is a totally viable path for long term training of robots on challenging tasks.
The major roadblock we still face though is having a single model reach competency on multiple tasks without losing competency on earlier ones. I'm willing to train a robot once for each new task, but I'm not willing to constantly retrain it on old ones or wait for it to start from scratch after it's learned a few basic tasks.
We expect skill learning to be compositional and, like learning to ride a bike, easily retained.
This problem (often referred to as life-long learning, or overcoming catastrophic forgetting) is a deep problem in modern ML.
- eli_gottlieb 7y agoYeah, and I could do big things with extensions to this where we can use deep probabilistic programs to represent the event queries.
- so_tired 7y agoI never really tried multi-task learning. Is it so catastrophic ? If I have several tasks, plenty of samples for each task, and a network that converges well for each task. Cant i just mix and task-label these samples, train from scratch a slightly bigger network, and ta dam .. a multi modal network or what ever?
- iandanforth 7y agoYes you can! The "mix" part is key. It's the sequential learning which screws up networks today. If you randomly sample from tasks you're fine, or if you can replay older tasks while you're learning new ones (essentially another form of random sampling) the network can learn multiple tasks. But the moment you drop a task from a distribution of training data you're going to start losing competency on it. By default neural networks don't have mechanisms to protect data (weights) from being over-written.