Reinforcement Learning
Learning to Beat ByteRL: Exploitability of Collectible Card Game Agents
Haluska, Radovan, Schmid, Martin
The goal of the game is to decrease While Poker, as a family of games, has been studied extensively in the opponent's health to zero. There are many popular collectible the last decades, collectible card games have seen relatively little card games, such as Magic: The Gathering [24], Hearthstone [3], attention. Only recently have we seen an agent that can compete The Elder Scrolls: Legends [20] and many others. A trait that makes with professional human players in Hearthstone, one of the most collectible card games appealing to human players and challenging popular collectible card games. Although artificial agents must be for AI agents is the broad range of ways to mix and match available able to work with imperfect information in both of these genres, cards into decks. Even small collectible card games with tens of collectible card games pose another set of distinct challenges. Unlike available cards can offer more potential decks than the total number in many poker variants, agents must deal with state space so vast of atoms in the universe [17].
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Bipedal Locomotion: A Brief Survey
Bao, Lingfan, Humphreys, Joseph, Peng, Tianhu, Zhou, Chengxu
Bipedal robots are garnering increasing global attention due to their potential applications and advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). While DRL has driven significant progress in bipedal locomotion, developing a comprehensive and unified framework capable of adeptly performing a wide range of tasks remains a challenge. This survey systematically categorizes, compares, and summarizes existing DRL frameworks for bipedal locomotion, organizing them into end-to-end and hierarchical control schemes. End-to-end frameworks are assessed based on their learning approaches, whereas hierarchical frameworks are dissected into layers that utilize either learning-based methods or traditional model-based approaches. This survey provides a detailed analysis of the composition, capabilities, strengths, and limitations of each framework type. Furthermore, we identify critical research gaps and propose future directions aimed at achieving a more integrated and efficient framework for bipedal locomotion, with potential broad applications in everyday life.
DrS: Learning Reusable Dense Rewards for Multi-Stage Tasks
Mu, Tongzhou, Liu, Minghua, Su, Hao
The success of many RL techniques heavily relies on human-engineered dense rewards, which typically demand substantial domain expertise and extensive trial and error. In our work, we propose DrS (Dense reward learning from Stages), a novel approach for learning reusable dense rewards for multi-stage tasks in a data-driven manner. By leveraging the stage structures of the task, DrS learns a high-quality dense reward from sparse rewards and demonstrations if given. The learned rewards can be \textit{reused} in unseen tasks, thus reducing the human effort for reward engineering. Extensive experiments on three physical robot manipulation task families with 1000+ task variants demonstrate that our learned rewards can be reused in unseen tasks, resulting in improved performance and sample efficiency of RL algorithms. The learned rewards even achieve comparable performance to human-engineered rewards on some tasks. See our project page (https://sites.google.com/view/iclr24drs) for more details.
Distilling Privileged Information for Dubins Traveling Salesman Problems with Neighborhoods
Shin, Min Kyu, Park, Su-Jeong, Ryu, Seung-Keol, Kim, Heeyeon, Choi, Han-Lim
This paper presents a novel learning approach for Dubins Traveling Salesman Problems(DTSP) with Neighborhood (DTSPN) to quickly produce a tour of a non-holonomic vehicle passing through neighborhoods of given task points. The method involves two learning phases: initially, a model-free reinforcement learning approach leverages privileged information to distill knowledge from expert trajectories generated by the LinKernighan heuristic (LKH) algorithm. Subsequently, a supervised learning phase trains an adaptation network to solve problems independently of privileged information. Before the first learning phase, a parameter initialization technique using the demonstration data was also devised to enhance training efficiency. The proposed learning method produces a solution about 50 times faster than LKH and substantially outperforms other imitation learning and RL with demonstration schemes, most of which fail to sense all the task points.
Exploring the Dynamics of Data Transmission in 5G Networks: A Conceptual Analysis
Smirnov, Nikita, Tomforde, Sven
This conceptual analysis examines the dynamics of data transmission in 5G networks. It addresses various aspects of sending data from cameras and LiDARs installed on a remote-controlled ferry to a land-based control center. The range of topics includes all stages of video and LiDAR data processing from acquisition and encoding to final decoding, all aspects of their transmission and reception via the WebRTC protocol, and all possible types of network problems such as handovers or congestion that could affect the quality of experience for end-users. A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the key aspects of the data transmission. These include simulation-based reproducible runs and real-world experiments conducted using open-source solutions we developed: "Gymir5G" - an OMNeT++-based 5G simulation and "GstWebRTCApp" - a GStreamer-based application for adaptive control of media streams over the WebRTC protocol. One of the goals of this study is to formulate the bandwidth and latency requirements for reliable real-time communication and to estimate their approximate values. This goal was achieved through simulation-based experiments involving docking maneuvers in the Bay of Kiel, Germany. The final latency for the entire data processing pipeline was also estimated during the real tests. In addition, a series of simulation-based experiments showed the impact of key WebRTC features and demonstrated the effectiveness of the WebRTC protocol, while the conducted video codec comparison showed that the hardware-accelerated H.264 codec is the best. Finally, the research addresses the topic of adaptive communication, where the traditional congestion avoidance and deep reinforcement learning approaches were analyzed. The comparison in a sandbox scenario shows that the AI-based solution outperforms the WebRTC baseline GCC algorithm in terms of data rates, latency, and packet loss.
A Dual Perspective of Reinforcement Learning for Imposing Policy Constraints
De Cooman, Bram, Suykens, Johan
Model-free reinforcement learning methods lack an inherent mechanism to impose behavioural constraints on the trained policies. While certain extensions exist, they remain limited to specific types of constraints, such as value constraints with additional reward signals or visitation density constraints. In this work we try to unify these existing techniques and bridge the gap with classical optimization and control theory, using a generic primal-dual framework for value-based and actor-critic reinforcement learning methods. The obtained dual formulations turn out to be especially useful for imposing additional constraints on the learned policy, as an intrinsic relationship between such dual constraints (or regularization terms) and reward modifications in the primal is reveiled. Furthermore, using this framework, we are able to introduce some novel types of constraints, allowing to impose bounds on the policy's action density or on costs associated with transitions between consecutive states and actions. From the adjusted primal-dual optimization problems, a practical algorithm is derived that supports various combinations of policy constraints that are automatically handled throughout training using trainable reward modifications. The resulting $\texttt{DualCRL}$ method is examined in more detail and evaluated under different (combinations of) constraints on two interpretable environments. The results highlight the efficacy of the method, which ultimately provides the designer of such systems with a versatile toolbox of possible policy constraints.
Benchmarking Mobile Device Control Agents across Diverse Configurations
Lee, Juyong, Min, Taywon, An, Minyong, Kim, Changyeon, Lee, Kimin
Developing autonomous agents for mobile devices can significantly enhance user interactions by offering increased efficiency and accessibility. However, despite the growing interest in mobile device control agents, the absence of a commonly adopted benchmark makes it challenging to quantify scientific progress in this area. In this work, we introduce B-MoCA: a novel benchmark designed specifically for evaluating mobile device control agents. To create a realistic benchmark, we develop B-MoCA based on the Android operating system and define 60 common daily tasks. Importantly, we incorporate a randomization feature that changes various aspects of mobile devices, including user interface layouts and language settings, to assess generalization performance. We benchmark diverse agents, including agents employing large language models (LLMs) or multi-modal LLMs as well as agents trained from scratch using human expert demonstrations. While these agents demonstrate proficiency in executing straightforward tasks, their poor performance on complex tasks highlights significant opportunities for future research to enhance their effectiveness. Our source code is publicly available at https://b-moca.github.io.
IDIL: Imitation Learning of Intent-Driven Expert Behavior
Seo, Sangwon, Unhelkar, Vaibhav
When faced with accomplishing a task, human experts exhibit intentional behavior. Their unique intents shape their plans and decisions, resulting in experts demonstrating diverse behaviors to accomplish the same task. Due to the uncertainties encountered in the real world and their bounded rationality, experts sometimes adjust their intents, which in turn influences their behaviors during task execution. This paper introduces IDIL, a novel imitation learning algorithm to mimic these diverse intent-driven behaviors of experts. Iteratively, our approach estimates expert intent from heterogeneous demonstrations and then uses it to learn an intent-aware model of their behavior. Unlike contemporary approaches, IDIL is capable of addressing sequential tasks with high-dimensional state representations, while sidestepping the complexities and drawbacks associated with adversarial training (a mainstay of related techniques). Our empirical results suggest that the models generated by IDIL either match or surpass those produced by recent imitation learning benchmarks in metrics of task performance. Moreover, as it creates a generative model, IDIL demonstrates superior performance in intent inference metrics, crucial for human-agent interactions, and aptly captures a broad spectrum of expert behaviors.
ORBIT-Surgical: An Open-Simulation Framework for Learning Surgical Augmented Dexterity
Yu, Qinxi, Moghani, Masoud, Dharmarajan, Karthik, Schorp, Vincent, Panitch, William Chung-Ho, Liu, Jingzhou, Hari, Kush, Huang, Huang, Mittal, Mayank, Goldberg, Ken, Garg, Animesh
Physics-based simulations have accelerated progress in robot learning for driving, manipulation, and locomotion. Yet, a fast, accurate, and robust surgical simulation environment remains a challenge. In this paper, we present ORBIT-Surgical, a physics-based surgical robot simulation framework with photorealistic rendering in NVIDIA Omniverse. We provide 14 benchmark surgical tasks for the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) and Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) which represent common subtasks in surgical training. ORBIT-Surgical leverages GPU parallelization to train reinforcement learning and imitation learning algorithms to facilitate study of robot learning to augment human surgical skills. ORBIT-Surgical also facilitates realistic synthetic data generation for active perception tasks. We demonstrate ORBIT-Surgical sim-to-real transfer of learned policies onto a physical dVRK robot. Project website: orbit-surgical.github.io
Unified ODE Analysis of Smooth Q-Learning Algorithms
Convergence of Q-learning has been the focus of extensive research over the past several decades. Recently, an asymptotic convergence analysis for Q-learning was introduced using a switching system framework. This approach applies the so-called ordinary differential equation (ODE) approach to prove the convergence of the asynchronous Q-learning modeled as a continuous-time switching system, where notions from switching system theory are used to prove its asymptotic stability without using explicit Lyapunov arguments. However, to prove stability, restrictive conditions, such as quasi-monotonicity, must be satisfied for the underlying switching systems, which makes it hard to easily generalize the analysis method to other reinforcement learning algorithms, such as the smooth Q-learning variants. In this paper, we present a more general and unified convergence analysis that improves upon the switching system approach and can analyze Q-learning and its smooth variants. The proposed analysis is motivated by previous work on the convergence of synchronous Q-learning based on $p$-norm serving as a Lyapunov function. However, the proposed analysis addresses more general ODE models that can cover both asynchronous Q-learning and its smooth versions with simpler frameworks.