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Ioannis Antonoglou

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

7 papers
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Possible papers

7

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Planning in Stochastic Environments with a Learned Model

  • Ioannis Antonoglou
  • Julian Schrittwieser
  • Sherjil Ozair
  • Thomas Hubert
  • David Silver 0001

Model-based reinforcement learning has proven highly successful. However, learning a model in isolation from its use during planning is problematic in complex environments. To date, the most effective techniques have instead combined value-equivalent model learning with powerful tree-search methods. This approach is exemplified by MuZero, which has achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of domains, from board games to visually rich environments, with discrete and continuous action spaces, in online and offline settings. However, previous instantiations of this approach were limited to the use of deterministic models. This limits their performance in environments that are inherently stochastic, partially observed, or so large and complex that they appear stochastic to a finite agent. In this paper we extend this approach to learn and plan with stochastic models. Specifically, we introduce a new algorithm, Stochastic MuZero, that learns a stochastic model incorporating afterstates, and uses this model to perform a stochastic tree search. Stochastic MuZero matched or exceeded the state of the art in a set of canonical single and multi-agent environments, including 2048 and backgammon, while maintaining the same performance as standard MuZero in the game of Go.

ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Learning and Planning in Complex Action Spaces

  • Thomas Hubert
  • Julian Schrittwieser
  • Ioannis Antonoglou
  • Mohammadamin Barekatain
  • Simon Schmitt
  • David Silver 0001

Many important real-world problems have action spaces that are high-dimensional, continuous or both, making full enumeration of all possible actions infeasible. Instead, only small subsets of actions can be sampled for the purpose of policy evaluation and improvement. In this paper, we propose a general framework to reason in a principled way about policy evaluation and improvement over such sampled action subsets. This sample-based policy iteration framework can in principle be applied to any reinforcement learning algorithm based upon policy iteration. Concretely, we propose Sampled MuZero, an extension of the MuZero algorithm that is able to learn in domains with arbitrarily complex action spaces by planning over sampled actions. We demonstrate this approach on the classical board game of Go and on two continuous control benchmark domains: DeepMind Control Suite and Real-World RL Suite.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Online and Offline Reinforcement Learning by Planning with a Learned Model

  • Julian Schrittwieser
  • Thomas Hubert
  • Amol Mandhane
  • Mohammadamin Barekatain
  • Ioannis Antonoglou
  • David Silver

Learning efficiently from small amounts of data has long been the focus of model-based reinforcement learning, both for the online case when interacting with the environment, and the offline case when learning from a fixed dataset. However, to date no single unified algorithm could demonstrate state-of-the-art results for both settings. In this work, we describe the Reanalyse algorithm, which uses model-based policy and value improvement operators to compute improved training targets for existing data points, allowing for efficient learning at data budgets varying by several orders of magnitude. We further show that Reanalyse can also be used to learn completely without environment interactions, as in the case of Offline Reinforcement Learning (Offline RL). Combining Reanalyse with the MuZero algorithm, we introduce MuZero Unplugged, a single unified algorithm for any data budget, including Offline RL. In contrast to previous work, our algorithm requires no special adaptations for the off-policy or Offline RL settings. MuZero Unplugged sets new state-of-the-art results for Atari in the standard 200 million frame online setting as well as in the RL Unplugged Offline RL benchmark.

ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Vector Quantized Models for Planning

  • Sherjil Ozair
  • Yazhe Li
  • Ali Razavi
  • Ioannis Antonoglou
  • Aäron van den Oord
  • Oriol Vinyals

Recent developments in the field of model-based RL have proven successful in a range of environments, especially ones where planning is essential. However, such successes have been limited to deterministic fully-observed environments. We present a new approach that handles stochastic and partially-observable environments. Our key insight is to use discrete autoencoders to capture the multiple possible effects of an action in a stochastic environment. We use a stochastic variant of Monte Carlo tree search to plan over both the agent’s actions and the discrete latent variables representing the environment’s response. Our approach significantly outperforms an offline version of MuZero on a stochastic interpretation of chess where the opponent is considered part of the environment. We also show that our approach scales to DeepMind Lab, a first-person 3D environment with large visual observations and partial observability.

ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Monte-Carlo Tree Search as Regularized Policy Optimization

  • Jean-Bastien Grill
  • Florent Altché
  • Yunhao Tang
  • Thomas Hubert
  • Michal Valko
  • Ioannis Antonoglou
  • Rémi Munos

The combination of Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) with deep reinforcement learning has led to groundbreaking results in artificial intelligence. However, AlphaZero, the current state-of-the-art MCTS algorithm still relies on handcrafted heuristics that are only partially understood. In this paper, we show that AlphaZero’s search heuristic, along with other common ones, can be interpreted as an approximation to the solution of a specific regularized policy optimization problem. With this insight, we propose a variant of AlphaZero which uses the exact solution to this policy optimization problem, and show experimentally that it reliably outperforms the original algorithm in multiple domains.

ICML Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Learning to Search with MCTSnets

  • Arthur Guez
  • Theophane Weber
  • Ioannis Antonoglou
  • Karen Simonyan
  • Oriol Vinyals
  • Daan Wierstra
  • Rémi Munos
  • David Silver 0001

Planning problems are among the most important and well-studied problems in artificial intelligence. They are most typically solved by tree search algorithms that simulate ahead into the future, evaluate future states, and back-up those evaluations to the root of a search tree. Among these algorithms, Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) is one of the most general, powerful and widely used. A typical implementation of MCTS uses cleverly designed rules, optimised to the particular characteristics of the domain. These rules control where the simulation traverses, what to evaluate in the states that are reached, and how to back-up those evaluations. In this paper we instead learn where, what and how to search. Our architecture, which we call an MCTSnet, incorporates simulation-based search inside a neural network, by expanding, evaluating and backing-up a vector embedding. The parameters of the network are trained end-to-end using gradient-based optimisation. When applied to small searches in the well-known planning problem Sokoban, the learned search algorithm significantly outperformed MCTS baselines.

ICLR Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Unit Tests for Stochastic Optimization

  • Tom Schaul
  • Ioannis Antonoglou
  • David Silver 0001

Optimization by stochastic gradient descent is an important component of many large-scale machine learning algorithms. A wide variety of such optimization algorithms have been devised; however, it is unclear whether these algorithms are robust and widely applicable across many different optimization landscapes. In this paper we develop a collection of unit tests for stochastic optimization. Each unit test rapidly evaluates an optimization algorithm on a small-scale, isolated, and well-understood difficulty, rather than in real-world scenarios where many such issues are entangled. Passing these unit tests is not sufficient, but absolutely necessary for any algorithms with claims to generality or robustness. We give initial quantitative and qualitative results on a dozen established algorithms. The testing framework is open-source, extensible, and easy to apply to new algorithms.

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