Switching costs, which capture the costs for changing policies, are regarded as a critical metric in reinforcement learning (RL), in addition to the standard metric of losses (or rewards). However, existing studies on switching costs (with a coefficient $\beta$ that is strictly positive and is independent of $T$) have mainly focused on static RL, where the loss distribution is assumed to be fixed during the learning process, and thus practical scenarios where the loss distribution could be non-stationary or even adversarial are not considered. While adversarial RL better models this type of practical scenarios, an open problem remains: how to develop a provably efficient algorithm for adversarial RL with switching costs? This paper makes the first effort towards solving this problem. First, we provide a regret lower-bound that shows that the regret of any algorithm must be larger than $\tilde{\Omega}( ( H S A )^{1/3} T^{2/3} )$, where $T$, $S$, $A$ and $H$ are the number of episodes, states, actions and layers in each episode, respectively. Our lower bound indicates that, due to the fundamental challenge of switching costs in adversarial RL, the best achieved regret (whose dependency on $T$ is $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$) in static RL with switching costs (as well as adversarial RL without switching costs) is no longer achievable. Moreover, we propose two novel switching-reduced algorithms with regrets that match our lower bound when the transition function is known, and match our lower bound within a small factor of $\tilde{O}( H^{1/3} )$ when the transition function is unknown. Our regret analysis demonstrates the near-optimal performance of them.

When a vehicle drives on the road, its behaviors will be affected by surrounding vehicles. Prediction and decision should not be considered as two separate stages because all vehicles make decisions interactively. This paper constructs the multi-vehicle driving scenario as a non-zero-sum game and proposes a novel game control framework, which consider prediction, decision and control as a whole. The mutual influence of interactions between vehicles is considered in this framework because decisions are made by Nash equilibrium strategy. To efficiently obtain the strategy, ADP, a model-based reinforcement learning method, is used to solve coupled Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations. Driving performance is evaluated by tracking, efficiency, safety and comfort indices. Experiments show that our algorithm could drive perfectly by directly controlling acceleration and steering angle. Vehicles could learn interactive behaviors such as overtaking and pass. In summary, we propose a non-zero-sum game framework for modeling multi-vehicle driving, provide an effective way to solve the Nash equilibrium driving strategy, and validate at non-signalized intersections.

Deep reinforcement learning policies, despite their outstanding efficiency in simulated visual control tasks, have shown disappointing ability to generalize across disturbances in the input training images. Changes in image statistics or distracting background elements are pitfalls that prevent generalization and real-world applicability of such control policies. We elaborate on the intuition that a good visual policy should be able to identify which pixels are important for its decision, and preserve this identification of important sources of information across images. This implies that training of a policy with small generalization gap should focus on such important pixels and ignore the others. This leads to the introduction of saliency-guided Q-networks (SGQN), a generic method for visual reinforcement learning, that is compatible with any value function learning method. SGQN vastly improves the generalization capability of Soft Actor-Critic agents and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the Deepmind Control Generalization benchmark, setting a new reference in terms of training efficiency, generalization gap, and policy interpretability.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy for sequential decision-making using a pre-collected dataset, without further interaction with the environment. Recent theoretical progress has focused on developing sample-efficient offline RL algorithms with various relaxed assumptions on data coverage and function approximators, especially to handle the case with excessively large state-action spaces. Among them, the framework based on the linear-programming (LP) reformulation of Markov decision processes has shown promise: it enables sample-efficient offline RL with function approximation, under only partial data coverage and realizability assumptions on the function classes, with favorable computational tractability. In this work, we revisit the LP framework for offline RL, and provide a new reformulation that advances the existing results in several aspects, relaxing certain assumptions and achieving optimal statistical rates in terms of sample size. Our key enabler is to introduce proper constraints in the reformulation, instead of using any regularization as in the literature, also with careful choices of the function classes and initial state distributions. We hope our insights bring into light the use of LP formulations and the induced primal-dual minimax optimization, in offline RL.

Reinforcement learning provides a conceptual framework for autonomous agents to learn from experience, analogously to how one might train a pet with treats. But practical applications of reinforcement learning are often far from natural: instead of using RL to learn through trial and error by actually attempting the desired task, typical RL applications use a separate (usually simulated) training phase. For example, AlphaGo did not learn to play Go by competing against thousands of humans, but rather by playing against itself in simulation. While this kind of simulated training is appealing for games where the rules are perfectly known, applying this to real world domains such as robotics can require a range of complex approaches, such as the use of simulated data, or instrumenting real-world environments in various ways to make training feasible under laboratory conditions. Can we instead devise reinforcement learning systems for robots that allow them to learn directly "on-the-job", while performing the task that they are required to do?

Process design is a creative task that is currently performed manually by engineers. Artificial intelligence provides new potential to facilitate process design. Specifically, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown some success in automating process design by integrating data-driven models that learn to build process flowsheets with process simulation in an iterative design process. However, one major challenge in the learning process is that the RL agent demands numerous process simulations in rigorous process simulators, thereby requiring long simulation times and expensive computational power. Therefore, typically short-cut simulation methods are employed to accelerate the learning process. Short-cut methods can, however, lead to inaccurate results. We thus propose to utilize transfer learning for process design with RL in combination with rigorous simulation methods. Transfer learning is an established approach from machine learning that stores knowledge gained while solving one problem and reuses this information on a different target domain. We integrate transfer learning in our RL framework for process design and apply it to an illustrative case study comprising equilibrium reactions, azeotropic separation, and recycles, our method can design economically feasible flowsheets with stable interaction with DWSIM. Our results show that transfer learning enables RL to economically design feasible flowsheets with DWSIM, resulting in a flowsheet with an 8% higher revenue. And the learning time can be reduced by a factor of 2.

We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative prediction~\cite{Perdomo et. al., 2020}, we introduce the concept of performatively stable policy. We then consider a regularized version of the reinforcement learning problem and show that repeatedly optimizing this objective converges to a performatively stable policy under reasonable assumptions on the transition dynamics. Our proof utilizes the dual perspective of the reinforcement learning problem and may be of independent interest in analyzing the convergence of other algorithms with decision-dependent environments. We then extend our results for the setting where the learner just performs gradient ascent steps instead of fully optimizing the objective, and for the setting where the learner has access to a finite number of trajectories from the changed environment. For both settings, we leverage the dual formulation of performative reinforcement learning and establish convergence to a stable solution. Finally, through extensive experiments on a grid-world environment, we demonstrate the dependence of convergence on various parameters e.g. regularization, smoothness, and the number of samples.

The ongoing rise in cyberattacks and the lack of skilled professionals in the cybersecurity domain to combat these attacks show the need for automated tools capable of detecting an attack with good performance. Attackers disguise their actions and launch attacks that consist of multiple actions, which are difficult to detect. Therefore, improving defensive tools requires their calibration against a well-trained attacker. In this work, we propose a model of an attacking agent and environment and evaluate its performance using basic Q-Learning, Naive Q-learning, and DoubleQ-Learning, all of which are variants of Q-Learning. The attacking agent is trained with the goal of exfiltrating data whereby all the hosts in the network have a non-zero detection probability. Results show that the DoubleQ-Learning agent has the best overall performance rate by successfully achieving the goal in $70\%$ of the interactions.

These days automation is being applied everywhere. In every environment, planning for the actions to be taken by the agents is an important aspect. In this paper, we plan to implement planning for multi-agents with a centralized controller. We compare three approaches: random policy, Q-learning, and Q-learning with Options Framework. We also show the effectiveness of planners by showing performance comparison between Q-Learning with Planner and without Planner.

Logic synthesis is one of the most important steps in design and implementation of digital chips with a big impact on final Quality of Results (QoR). For a most general input circuit modeled by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), many logic synthesis problems such as delay or area minimization are NP-Complete, hence, no optimal solution is available. This is why many classical logic optimization functions tend to follow greedy approaches that are easily trapped in local minima that does not allow improving QoR as much as needed. We believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and more specifically Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can help in solving this problem. This is because AI and RL can help minimizing QoR further by exiting from local minima. Our experiments on both open source and industrial benchmark circuits show that significant improvements on important metrics such as area, delay, and power can be achieved by making logic synthesis optimization functions AI-driven. For example, our RL-based rewriting algorithm could improve total cell area post-synthesis by up to 69.3% when compared to a classical rewriting algorithm with no AI awareness.