In this paper, we propose TauRieL and target Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) since it has broad applicability in theoretical and applied sciences. TauRieL utilizes an actor-critic inspired architecture that adopts ordinary feedforward nets to obtain a policy update vector @math . Then, we use @math to improve the state transition matrix from which we generate the policy. Also, the state transition matrix allows the solver to initialize from precomputed solutions such as nearest neighbors. In an online learning setting, TauRieL unifies the training and the search where it can generate near-optimal results in seconds. The input to the neural nets in the actor-critic architecture are raw 2-D inputs, and the design idea behind this decision is to keep neural nets relatively smaller than the architectures with wide embeddings with the tradeoff of omitting any distributed representations of the embeddings. Consequently, TauRieL generates TSP solutions two orders of magnitude faster per TSP instance as compared to state-of-the-art offline techniques with a performance impact of 6.1 in the worst case.
The authors of @cite_12 present a deep Q-learning @cite_14 and a graph embedding based solution to target combinatorial optimization problems. Given a problem as graph, they first perform function mappings such as belief propagation that learns feature vectors from latent variable models. Then, the learned embeddings allow to learn a construction graph building heuristic. The Q-learning allows to construct the solution based on the reward which is defined as the change in the cost function among the candidates. A helper function is also employed that helps to satisfy the constraints of the combinatorial optimization from the partial solution throughout the construction process.
@cite_14 @cite_12
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Using deep neural nets as function approximator for reinforcement learning tasks have recently been shown to be very powerful for solving problems approaching real-world complexity. Using these results as a benchmark, we discuss the role that the discount factor may play in the quality of the learning process of a deep Q-network (DQN). When the discount factor progressively increases up to its final value, we empirically show that it is possible to significantly reduce the number of learning steps. When used in conjunction with a varying learning rate, we empirically show that it outperforms original DQN on several experiments. We relate this phenomenon with the instabilities of neural networks when they are used in an approximate Dynamic Programming setting. We also describe the possibility to fall within a local optimum during the learning process, thus connecting our discussion with the exploration exploitation dilemma. Celebrated and its fruitful variants are powerful models to achieve excellent performance on the tasks that map sequences to sequences. However, these are many machine learning tasks with inputs naturally represented in a form of graphs, which imposes significant challenges to existing Seq2Seq models for lossless conversion from its graph form to the sequence. In this work, we present a general end-to-end approach to map the input graph to a sequence of vectors, and then another attention-based LSTM to decode the target sequence from these vectors. Specifically, to address inevitable information loss for data conversion, we introduce a novel graph-to-sequence neural network model that follows the encoder-decoder architecture. Our method first uses an improved graph-based neural network to generate the node and graph embeddings by a novel aggregation strategy to incorporate the edge direction information into the node embeddings. We also propose an attention based mechanism that aligns node embeddings and decoding sequence to better cope with large graphs. Experimental results on bAbI task, Shortest Path Task, and Natural Language Generation Task demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforms other baselines. We also show that with the proposed aggregation strategy, our proposed model is able to quickly converge to good performance. Recent approaches to question generation have used modifications to a Seq2Seq architecture inspired by advances in machine translation. Models are trained using teacher forcing to optimise only the one-step-ahead prediction. However, at test time, the model is asked to generate a whole sequence, causing errors to propagate through the generation process (exposure bias). A number of authors have proposed countering this bias by optimising for a reward that is less tightly coupled to the training data, using reinforcement learning. We optimise directly for quality metrics, including a novel approach using a discriminator learned directly from the training data. We confirm that policy gradient methods can be used to decouple training from the ground truth, leading to increases in the metrics used as rewards. We perform a human evaluation, and show that although these metrics have previously been assumed to be good proxies for question quality, they are poorly aligned with human judgement and the model simply learns to exploit the weaknesses of the reward source. Imitation learning of sequential, goal-directed behavior by standard supervised techniques is often difficult. We frame learning such behaviors as a maximum margin structured prediction problem over a space of policies. In this approach, we learn mappings from features to cost so an optimal policy in an MDP with these cost mimics the expert's behavior. Further, we demonstrate a simple, provably efficient approach to structured maximum margin learning, based on the subgradient method, that leverages existing fast algorithms for inference. Although the technique is general, it is particularly relevant in problems where A* and dynamic programming approaches make learning policies tractable in problems beyond the limitations of a QP formulation. We demonstrate our approach applied to route planning for outdoor mobile robots, where the behavior a designer wishes a planner to execute is often clear, while specifying cost functions that engender this behavior is a much more difficult task.