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Pacman Trainer: Classroom-Ready Deep Learning from Data to Deployment

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Computers in Education 9 - Technology I

Page Count

14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--40897

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/40897

Download Count

344

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Paper Authors

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Andrew Forney Loyola Marymount University

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Mandy Korpusik Loyola Marymount University

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Dr. Korpusik is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University. She received her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and completed her S.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT. Her primary research interests include natural language processing and spoken language understanding for dialogue systems. Dr. Korpusik used deep learning models to build the Coco Nutritionist application for iOS that allows obesity patients to more easily track the food they eat by speaking naturally. This system was patented, as well as her work at FXPAL using deep learning for purchase intent prediction.

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Masao Kitamura Loyola Marymount University

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Abstract

Deep learning has seen a meteoric rise in the machine learning community and has vastly changed the landscape of many fields like computer vision and natural language processing. Yet, for all of its successful applications, connecting deep learning theory to practice remains a challenge in the classroom, with students typically only seeing parts of the data-collection, training, and deployment process at a time. To address these difficulties, this work presents Pacman Trainer, a web application that can be used as a class activity in which students provide the best move for Pacman to take in a given maze and prompt, thus generating a labeled dataset for supervised deep-imitation learning. By experiencing first-hand how training data is labeled, sanitized, vectorized, used during training, and then deployed to control Pacman in the same environment, students grasp the entirety of the deep learning pipeline concretely. This experience also highlights the shortcomings of deep imitation learning, which segues to discussions of overfitting, generalizability, and reinforcement learning alternatives, in which Pacman agents can be trained online in the same environment to juxtapose learning paradigms. Classroom-ready instructions, examples, and accessory exercises are provided using Pytorch, complete with clonable repositories suitable for GitHub Classroom integration.

Forney, A., & Korpusik, M., & Kitamura, M. (2022, August), Pacman Trainer: Classroom-Ready Deep Learning from Data to Deployment Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40897

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