Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 Projects

CompLACS

• Type: COOPERATION

• Defi: Composing Learning for Artificial Cognitive Systems

• Instrument: Specific Targeted Research Project

• Objectif: Cognitive Systems and Robotics

• Duration: March 2011 - February 2015

• Coordinator: University College London

• Partner:

  • Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning, University College London (United Kingdom)

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol (United Kingdom)

  • Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London (United Kingdom)

  • SNN Machine Learning, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (The Netherlands)

  • Institut für Softwaretechnik und Theoretische Informatik, TU Berlin (Germany)

  • University of Leoben (Austria)

  • Computer Science Department, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt (Germany)

• Inria contact: Rémi MUNOS

• Website: COMPLACS

• Abstract: One of the aspirations of machine learning is to develop intelligent systems that can address a wide variety of control problems of many different types. However, although the community has developed successful technologies for many individual problems, these technologies have not previously been integrated into a unified framework. As a result, the technology used to specify, solve and analyse one control problem typically cannot be reused on a different problem. The community has fragmented into a diverse set of specialists with particular solutions to particular problems. The purpose of this project is to develop a unified toolkit for intelligent control in many different problem areas. This toolkit will incorporate many of the most successful approaches to a variety of important control problems within a single framework, including bandit problems, Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs), continuous stochastic control, and multi-agent systems. In addition, the toolkit will provide methods for the automatic construction of representations and capabilities, which can then be applied to any of these problem types. Finally, the toolkit will provide a generic interface to specifying problems and analysing performance, by mapping intuitive, human-understandable goals into machine-understandable objectives, and by mapping algorithm performance and regret back into human-understandable terms.

Collaborations with Major European Organizations

• Alexandra Carpentier: University of Cambridge (UK).

• Michal Valko collaborates with Alexandra on extreme event detection (such as network intrusion) with limited allocation capabilities.

• Prof. Marcello Restelli and Prof. Nicola Gatti: Politecnico di Milano (Italy).

• A. Lazaric continued his collaboration on transfer in reinforcement learning which is leading to an extended version of the last year work on transfer of samples in MDPs. Furthermore, we are going to submit an extended version of an application of multi-arm bandit in a strategic environment such as sponsored search auctions.