Starcraft II（SC2）对强化学习（RL）提出了巨大的挑战，其中主要困难包括巨大的状态空间，不同的动作空间和长期的视野。在这项工作中，我们研究了《星际争霸II》全长游戏的一系列RL技术。我们研究了涉及提取的宏观活动和神经网络的层次结构的层次RL方法。我们研究了课程转移培训程序，并在具有4个GPU和48个CPU线的单台计算机上训练代理。在64x64地图并使用限制性单元上，我们对内置AI的获胜率达到99％。通过课程转移学习算法和战斗模型的混合物，我们在最困难的非作战水平内置AI（7级）中获得了93％的胜利率。在本文的扩展版本中，我们改进了架构，以针对作弊水平训练代理商，并在8级，9级和10级AIS上达到胜利率，为96％，97％和94 ％， 分别。我们的代码在https://github.com/liuruoze/hiernet-sc2上。为了为我们的工作以及研究和开源社区提供基线，我们将其复制了一个缩放版本的Mini-Alphastar（MAS）。 MAS的最新版本为1.07，可以在具有564个动作的原始动作空间上进行培训。它旨在通过使超参数可调节来在单个普通机器上进行训练。然后，我们使用相同的资源将我们的工作与MAS进行比较，并表明我们的方法更有效。迷你α的代码在https://github.com/liuruoze/mini-alphastar上。我们希望我们的研究能够阐明对SC2和其他大型游戏有效增强学习的未来研究。

注入人类知识是加速加强学习（RL）的有效途径。但是，这些方法是缺乏缺陷的。本文介绍了我们发现的抽象前瞻性模型（思想游戏（TG））与转移学习（TL）相结合是有效的方式。我们将星际争霸II作为我们的学习环境。在设计的TG的帮助下，该代理可以在64x64地图上学习99％的速率，在一个商业机器中仅使用1.08小时的1级内置AI。我们还表明TG方法并不像被认为是限制性的。它可以使用粗略设计的TGS，并且在环境变化时也可以很有用。与以前的基于模型的RL相比，我们显示TG更有效。我们还提出了一种TG假设，其赋予TG不同保真度水平的影响。对于具有不等状态和行动空间的真实游戏，我们提出了一种新颖的XFRNET，其中有用性在验证有用性，同时达到欺骗级别-10 AI的90％的赢利。我们认为TG方法可能会在利用人类知识的进一步研究中进一步研究。

We propose a distributionally robust return-risk model for Markov decision processes (MDPs) under risk and reward ambiguity. The proposed model optimizes the weighted average of mean and percentile performances, and it covers the distributionally robust MDPs and the distributionally robust chance-constrained MDPs (both under reward ambiguity) as special cases. By considering that the unknown reward distribution lies in a Wasserstein ambiguity set, we derive the tractable reformulation for our model. In particular, we show that that the return-risk model can also account for risk from uncertain transition kernel when one only seeks deterministic policies, and that a distributionally robust MDP under the percentile criterion can be reformulated as its nominal counterpart at an adjusted risk level. A scalable first-order algorithm is designed to solve large-scale problems, and we demonstrate the advantages of our proposed model and algorithm through numerical experiments.

Forecasts by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF; EC for short) can provide a basis for the establishment of maritime-disaster warning systems, but they contain some systematic biases.The fifth-generation EC atmospheric reanalysis (ERA5) data have high accuracy, but are delayed by about 5 days. To overcome this issue, a spatiotemporal deep-learning method could be used for nonlinear mapping between EC and ERA5 data, which would improve the quality of EC wind forecast data in real time. In this study, we developed the Multi-Task-Double Encoder Trajectory Gated Recurrent Unit (MT-DETrajGRU) model, which uses an improved double-encoder forecaster architecture to model the spatiotemporal sequence of the U and V components of the wind field; we designed a multi-task learning loss function to correct wind speed and wind direction simultaneously using only one model. The study area was the western North Pacific (WNP), and real-time rolling bias corrections were made for 10-day wind-field forecasts released by the EC between December 2020 and November 2021, divided into four seasons. Compared with the original EC forecasts, after correction using the MT-DETrajGRU model the wind speed and wind direction biases in the four seasons were reduced by 8-11% and 9-14%, respectively. In addition, the proposed method modelled the data uniformly under different weather conditions. The correction performance under normal and typhoon conditions was comparable, indicating that the data-driven mode constructed here is robust and generalizable.

Despite a sea of interpretability methods that can produce plausible explanations, the field has also empirically seen many failure cases of such methods. In light of these results, it remains unclear for practitioners how to use these methods and choose between them in a principled way. In this paper, we show that for even moderately rich model classes (easily satisfied by neural networks), any feature attribution method that is complete and linear--for example, Integrated Gradients and SHAP--can provably fail to improve on random guessing for inferring model behaviour. Our results apply to common end-tasks such as identifying local model behaviour, spurious feature identification, and algorithmic recourse. One takeaway from our work is the importance of concretely defining end-tasks. In particular, we show that once such an end-task is defined, a simple and direct approach of repeated model evaluations can outperform many other complex feature attribution methods.

Visual language such as charts and plots is ubiquitous in the human world. Comprehending plots and charts requires strong reasoning skills. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) models require at least tens of thousands of training examples and their reasoning capabilities are still much limited, especially on complex human-written queries. This paper presents the first one-shot solution to visual language reasoning. We decompose the challenge of visual language reasoning into two steps: (1) plot-to-text translation, and (2) reasoning over the translated text. The key in this method is a modality conversion module, named as DePlot, which translates the image of a plot or chart to a linearized table. The output of DePlot can then be directly used to prompt a pretrained large language model (LLM), exploiting the few-shot reasoning capabilities of LLMs. To obtain DePlot, we standardize the plot-to-table task by establishing unified task formats and metrics, and train DePlot end-to-end on this task. DePlot can then be used off-the-shelf together with LLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Compared with a SOTA model finetuned on more than >28k data points, DePlot+LLM with just one-shot prompting achieves a 24.0% improvement over finetuned SOTA on human-written queries from the task of chart QA.

Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) are promising models that provide reliable policies under ambiguities in model parameters. As opposed to nominal Markov decision processes (MDPs), however, the state-of-the-art solution methods for RMDPs are limited to value-based methods, such as value iteration and policy iteration. This paper proposes Double-Loop Robust Policy Gradient (DRPG), the first generic policy gradient method for RMDPs with a global convergence guarantee in tabular problems. Unlike value-based methods, DRPG does not rely on dynamic programming techniques. In particular, the inner-loop robust policy evaluation problem is solved via projected gradient descent. Finally, our experimental results demonstrate the performance of our algorithm and verify our theoretical guarantees.

Visual language data such as plots, charts, and infographics are ubiquitous in the human world. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models do not perform well on these data. We propose MatCha (Math reasoning and Chart derendering pretraining) to enhance visual language models' capabilities in jointly modeling charts/plots and language data. Specifically, we propose several pretraining tasks that cover plot deconstruction and numerical reasoning which are the key capabilities in visual language modeling. We perform the MatCha pretraining starting from Pix2Struct, a recently proposed image-to-text visual language model. On standard benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA, the MatCha model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by as much as nearly 20%. We also examine how well MatCha pretraining transfers to domains such as screenshots, textbook diagrams, and document figures and observe overall improvement, verifying the usefulness of MatCha pretraining on broader visual language tasks.

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.

Accurate airway extraction from computed tomography (CT) images is a critical step for planning navigation bronchoscopy and quantitative assessment of airway-related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The existing methods are challenging to sufficiently segment the airway, especially the high-generation airway, with the constraint of the limited label and cannot meet the clinical use in COPD. We propose a novel two-stage 3D contextual transformer-based U-Net for airway segmentation using CT images. The method consists of two stages, performing initial and refined airway segmentation. The two-stage model shares the same subnetwork with different airway masks as input. Contextual transformer block is performed both in the encoder and decoder path of the subnetwork to finish high-quality airway segmentation effectively. In the first stage, the total airway mask and CT images are provided to the subnetwork, and the intrapulmonary airway mask and corresponding CT scans to the subnetwork in the second stage. Then the predictions of the two-stage method are merged as the final prediction. Extensive experiments were performed on in-house and multiple public datasets. Quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate that our proposed method extracted much more branches and lengths of the tree while accomplishing state-of-the-art airway segmentation performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zhaozsq/airway_segmentation.