In this paper, we present a robotic model-based reinforcement learning method that combines ideas from model identification and model predictive control. We use a feature-based representation of the dynamics that allows the dynamics model to be fitted with a simple least squares procedure, and the features are identified from a high-level specification of the robot's morphology, consisting of the number and connectivity structure of its links. Model predictive control is then used to choose the actions under an optimistic model of the dynamics, which produces an efficient and goal-directed exploration strategy. We present real time experimental results on standard benchmark problems involving the pendulum, cartpole, and double pendulum systems. Experiments indicate that our method is able to learn a range of benchmark tasks substantially faster than the previous best methods. To evaluate our approach on a realistic robotic control task, we also demonstrate real time control of a simulated 7 degree of freedom arm.

Tasks with unknown dynamics and costly system interaction time present a serious challenge for reinforcement learning. If a model of the dynamics can be learned quickly, interaction time can be reduced substantially. We show that combining an optimistic exploration strategy with model-predictive control can achieve very good sample complexity for a range of nonlinear systems. Our method learns a Dirichlet process mixture of linear models using an exploration strategy based on optimism in the face of uncertainty. Trajectory optimization is used to plan paths in the learned model that both minimize the cost and perform exploration. Experimental results show that our approach achieves some of the most sample-efficient learning rates on several benchmark problems, and is able to successfully learn to control a simulated helicopter during hover and autorotation with only seconds of interaction time. The computational requirements are substantial.

The expected return is a widely used objective in decision making under uncer- tainty. Many algorithms, such as value iteration, have been proposed to optimize it. In risk-aware settings, however, the expected return is often not an appropriate objective to optimize. We propose a new optimization objective for risk-aware planning and show that it has desirable theoretical properties. We also draw con- nections to previously proposed objectives for risk-aware planing: minmax, ex- ponential utility, percentile and mean minus variance. Our method applies to an extended class of Markov decision processes: we allow costs to be stochastic as long as they are bounded. Additionally, we present an efficient algorithm for op- timizing the proposed objective. Synthetic and real-world experiments illustrate the effectiveness of our method, at scale.

We report on our experience scaling up the Mobile Millennium traffic information system using cloud computing and the Spark cluster computing framework. Mobile Millennium uses machine learning to infer traffic conditions for large metropolitan areas from crowdsourced data, and Spark was specifically designed to support such applications. Many studies of cloud computing frameworks have demonstrated scalability and performance improvements for simple machine learning algorithms. Our experience implementing a real-world machine learning-based application corroborates such benefits, but we also encountered several challenges that have not been widely reported. These include: managing large parameter vectors, using memory efficiently, and integrating with the application's existing storage infrastructure. This paper describes these challenges and the changes they required in both the Spark framework and the Mobile Millennium software. While we focus on a system for traffic estimation, we believe that the lessons learned are applicable to other machine learning-based applications.

We develop a Bayesian model of digitized archival films and use this for denoising, or more specifically de-graining, individual frames. In contrast to previous approaches our model uses a learned spatial prior and a unique likelihood term that models the physics that generates the image grain. The spatial prior is represented by a high-order Markov random field based on the recently proposed field-of-experts framework. We propose a new model of the image grain in archival films based on an inhomogeneous beta distribution in which the variance is a function of image luminance. We train this noise model for a particular film and perform de-graining using a diffusion method. Quantitative results show improved signal-to-noise ratio relative to the standard ad hoc Gaussian noise model.