In this work we present a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for linearly-solvable Markov decision processes. Our approach assumes that the state space is partitioned, and the subtasks consist in moving between the partitions. We represent value functions on several levels of abstraction, and use the compositionality of subtasks to estimate the optimal values of the states in each partition. The policy is implicitly defined on these optimal value estimates, rather than being decomposed among the subtasks. As a consequence, our approach can learn the globally optimal policy, and does not suffer from the non-stationarity of high-level decisions. If several partitions have equivalent dynamics, the subtasks of those partitions can be shared. If the set of boundary states is smaller than the entire state space, our approach can have significantly smaller sample complexity than that of a flat learner, and we validate this empirically in several experiments.

In this paper, a CNN-based structure for time-frequency localization of audio signal information in the ASR acoustic model is proposed for Persian speech recognition. Research has shown that the receptive fields' time-frequency flexibility in some mammals' auditory neurons system improves recognition performance. Biosystems have inspired many artificial systems because of their high efficiency and performance, so time-frequency localization has been used extensively to improve system performance. In the last few years, much work has been done to localize time-frequency information in ASR systems, which has used the spatial immutability properties of methods such as TDNN, CNN and LSTM-RNN. However, most of these models have large parameter volumes and are challenging to train. In the structure we have designed, called Time-Frequency Convolutional Maxout Neural Network (TFCMNN), two parallel blocks consisting of 1D-CMNN each have weight sharing in one dimension, are applied simultaneously but independently to the feature vectors. Then their output is concatenated and applied to a fully connected Maxout network for classification. To improve the performance of this structure, we have used newly developed methods and models such as the maxout, Dropout, and weight normalization. Two experimental sets were designed and implemented on the Persian FARSDAT speech data set to evaluate the performance of this model compared to conventional 1D-CMNN models. According to the experimental results, the average recognition score of TFCMNN models is about 1.6% higher than the average of conventional models. In addition, the average training time of the TFCMNN models is about 17 hours lower than the average training time of traditional models. As a result, as mentioned in other references, time-frequency localization in ASR systems increases system accuracy and speeds up the model training process.

Learning generalizable manipulation skills is central for robots to achieve task automation in environments with endless scene and object variations. However, existing robot learning environments are limited in both scale and diversity of 3D assets (especially of articulated objects), making it difficult to train and evaluate the generalization ability of agents over novel objects. In this work, we focus on object-level generalization and propose SAPIEN Manipulation Skill Benchmark (abbreviated as ManiSkill), a large-scale learning-from-demonstrations benchmark for articulated object manipulation with 3D visual input (point cloud and RGB-D image). ManiSkill supports object-level variations by utilizing a rich and diverse set of articulated objects, and each task is carefully designed for learning manipulations on a single category of objects. We equip ManiSkill with a large number of high-quality demonstrations to facilitate learning-from-demonstrations approaches and perform evaluations on baseline algorithms. We believe that ManiSkill can encourage the robot learning community to explore more on learning generalizable object manipulation skills.

Embodied AI refers to the study and development of artificial agents that can perceive, reason, and interact with the environment with the capabilities and limitations of a physical body. Recently, significant progress has been made in developing solutions to embodied AI problems such as (visual) navigation [1-5], interactive Q&A [6-10], instruction following [11-15], and manipulation [16-22]. To calibrate the progress, several lines of pioneering efforts have been made towards benchmarking embodied AI in simulated environments, including Rearrangement [23, 24], TDW Transport Challenge [25], VirtualHome [26], ALFRED [11], Interactive Gibson Benchmark [27], MetaWorld [28], and RLBench [29], among others [30-32]). These efforts are inspiring, but their activities represent only a fraction of challenges that humans face in their daily lives. To develop artificial agents that can eventually perform and assist with everyday activities with human-level robustness and flexibility, we need a comprehensive benchmark with activities that are more realistic, diverse, and complex. But this is easier said than done. There are three major challenges that have prevented existing benchmarks to accommodate more realistic, diverse, and complex activities: - Definition: Identifying and defining meaningful activities for benchmarking; - Realization: Developing simulated environments that realistically support such activities; - Evaluation: Defining success and objective metrics for evaluating performance.

This work proposes a new class of proactive attacks called the Informational Denial-of-Service (IDoS) attacks that exploit the attentional human vulnerability. By generating a large volume of feints, IDoS attacks deplete the cognition resources of human operators to prevent humans from identifying the real attacks hidden among feints. This work aims to formally define IDoS attacks, quantify their consequences, and develop human-assistive security technologies to mitigate the severity level and risks of IDoS attacks. To this end, we model the feint and real attacks' sequential arrivals with category labels as a semi-Markov process. The assistive technology strategically manages human attention by highlighting selective alerts periodically to prevent the distraction of other alerts. A data-driven approach is applied to evaluate human performance under different Attention Management (AM) strategies. Under a representative special case, we establish the computational equivalency between two dynamic programming representations to simplify the theoretical computation and the online learning. A case study corroborates the effectiveness of the learning framework. The numerical results illustrate how AM strategies can alleviate the severity level and the risk of IDoS attacks. Furthermore, we characterize the fundamental limits of the minimum severity level under all AM strategies and the maximum length of the inspection period to reduce the IDoS risks.

Risk-bounded motion planning is an important yet difficult problem for safety-critical tasks. While existing mathematical programming methods offer theoretical guarantees in the context of constrained Markov decision processes, they either lack scalability in solving larger problems or produce conservative plans. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning improve scalability by learning policy networks as function approximators. In this paper, we propose an extension of soft actor critic model to estimate the execution risk of a plan through a risk critic and produce risk-bounded policies efficiently by adding an extra risk term in the loss function of the policy network. We define the execution risk in an accurate form, as opposed to approximating it through a summation of immediate risks at each time step that leads to conservative plans. Our proposed model is conditioned on a continuous spectrum of risk bounds, allowing the user to adjust the risk-averse level of the agent on the fly. Through a set of experiments, we show the advantage of our model in terms of both computational time and plan quality, compared to a state-of-the-art mathematical programming baseline, and validate its performance in more complicated scenarios, including nonlinear dynamics and larger state space.

This paper establishes non-asymptotic bounds on Wasserstein distances between the invariant probability measures of inexact MCMC methods and their target distribution. In particular, the results apply to the unadjusted Langevin algorithm and to unadjusted Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, but also to methods relying on other discretization schemes. Our focus is on understanding the precise dependence of the accuracy on both the dimension and the discretization step size. We show that the dimension dependence relies on some key quantities. As a consequence, the same dependence on the step size and the dimension as in the product case can be recovered for several important classes of models. On the other hand, for more general models, the dimension dependence of the asymptotic bias may be worse than in the product case even if the exact dynamics has dimension-free mixing properties.

For robots to operate in a three dimensional world and interact with humans, learning spatial relationships among objects in the surrounding is necessary. Reasoning about the state of the world requires inputs from many different sensory modalities including vision ($V$) and haptics ($H$). We examine the problem of desk organization: learning how humans spatially position different objects on a planar surface according to organizational ''preference''. We model this problem by examining how humans position objects given multiple features received from vision and haptic modalities. However, organizational habits vary greatly between people both in structure and adherence. To deal with user organizational preferences, we add an additional modality, ''utility'' ($U$), which informs on a particular human's perceived usefulness of a given object. Models were trained as generalized (over many different people) or tailored (per person). We use two types of models: random forests, which focus on precise multi-task classification, and Markov logic networks, which provide an easily interpretable insight into organizational habits. The models were applied to both synthetic data, which proved to be learnable when using fixed organizational constraints, and human-study data, on which the random forest achieved over 90% accuracy. Over all combinations of $\{H, U, V\}$ modalities, $UV$ and $HUV$ were the most informative for organization. In a follow-up study, we gauged participants preference of desk organizations by a generalized random forest organization vs. by a random model. On average, participants rated the random forest models as 4.15 on a 5-point Likert scale compared to 1.84 for the random model

This thesis explores the benefits machine learning algorithms can bring to online planning and scheduling for autonomous vehicles in off-road situations. Mainly, we focus on typical problems of interest which include computing itineraries that meet certain objectives, as well as computing scheduling strategies to execute synchronized maneuvers with other vehicles. We present a range of learning-based heuristics to assist different itinerary planners. We show that these heuristics allow a significant increase in performance for optimal planners. Furthermore, in the case of approximate planning, we show that not only does the running time decrease, the quality of the itinerary found also becomes almost always better. Finally, in order to synthesize strategies to execute synchronized maneuvers, we propose a novel type of scheduling controllability and a learning-assisted algorithm. The proposed framework achieves significant improvement on known benchmarks in this controllability type over the performance of state-of-the-art works in a related controllability type. Moreover, it is able to find strategies on complex scheduling problems for which previous works fail to do so.

Energy disaggregation, also known as non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), challenges the problem of separating the whole-home electricity usage into appliance-specific individual consumptions, which is a typical application of data analysis. {NILM aims to help households understand how the energy is used and consequently tell them how to effectively manage the energy, thus allowing energy efficiency which is considered as one of the twin pillars of sustainable energy policy (i.e., energy efficiency and renewable energy).} Although NILM is unidentifiable, it is widely believed that the NILM problem can be addressed by data science. Most of the existing approaches address the energy disaggregation problem by conventional techniques such as sparse coding, non-negative matrix factorization, and hidden Markov model. Recent advances reveal that deep neural networks (DNNs) can get favorable performance for NILM since DNNs can inherently learn the discriminative signatures of the different appliances. In this paper, we propose a novel method named adversarial energy disaggregation (AED) based on DNNs. We introduce the idea of adversarial learning into NILM, which is new for the energy disaggregation task. Our method trains a generator and multiple discriminators via an adversarial fashion. The proposed method not only learns shard representations for different appliances, but captures the specific multimode structures of each appliance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets verify that our method can achieve new state-of-the-art performance.