Tutorial Abstract

During the recent five years, there have been (at least) two developments of machine learning paradigms. One is to grant the machines with more access, i.e., from prediction to generation and decision making; the other is to extend the centralized single-agent scenarios to decentralized multi-agent scenarios. Therefore, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is obtaining more and more attention from both academia and industry.

In this tutorial, we first present a keynote on machine consciousness. Then we introduce the fundamentals of reinforcement learning, game theory. Finally, we discuss the advanced multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms and their latest applications.

Speaker Info

Jun Wang is Chair Professor, Computer Science, University College London, and Founding Director of MSc Web Science and Big Data Analytics. He is also Co-founder and Chief Scientist in MediaGamma Ltd, a UCL start-up company focusing on AI for intelligent audience decision making. Prof. Jun Wang's main research interests are in the areas of AI and intelligent systems, including (multiagent) reinforcement learning, deep generative models, and their diverse applications on information retrieval, recommender systems and personalization, data mining, smart cities, bot planning, computational advertising etc. Prof. Wang obtained his PhD degree in Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; MSc degree in National University of Singapore, Singapore; and Bachelor degree in Southeast University, Nanjing, China.

Weinan Zhang is now a tenure-track assistant professor in Department of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests include machine learning and big data mining, particularly, deep learning and (multi-agent) reinforcement learning architectures, mechanisms, training algorithms and their applications in real-world data mining scenarios including computational advertising, recommender systems, text mining, web search and knowledge graphs. Weinan earned his Ph.D. from University College London in 2016 and B.Eng. from ACM Class of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2011. He was an intern at MediaGamma, Microsoft Research, Google and DERI.