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 Reinforcement Learning


Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with SINDy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We draw on the latest advancements in the physics community to propose a novel method for discovering the governing non-linear dynamics of physical systems in reinforcement learning (RL). We establish that this method is capable of discovering the underlying dynamics using significantly fewer trajectories (as little as one rollout with $\leq 30$ time steps) than state of the art model learning algorithms. Further, the technique learns a model that is accurate enough to induce near-optimal policies given significantly fewer trajectories than those required by model-free algorithms. It brings the benefits of model-based RL without requiring a model to be developed in advance, for systems that have physics-based dynamics. To establish the validity and applicability of this algorithm, we conduct experiments on four classic control tasks. We found that an optimal policy trained on the discovered dynamics of the underlying system can generalize well. Further, the learned policy performs well when deployed on the actual physical system, thus bridging the model to real system gap. We further compare our method to state-of-the-art model-based and model-free approaches, and show that our method requires fewer trajectories sampled on the true physical system compared other methods. Additionally, we explored approximate dynamics models and found that they also can perform well.


Effective Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling with Deep Recurrent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-user delay constrained scheduling is important in many real-world applications including wireless communication, live streaming, and cloud computing. Yet, it poses a critical challenge since the scheduler needs to make real-time decisions to guarantee the delay and resource constraints simultaneously without prior information of system dynamics, which can be time-varying and hard to estimate. Moreover, many practical scenarios suffer from partial observability issues, e.g., due to sensing noise or hidden correlation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, named Recurrent Softmax Delayed Deep Double Deterministic Policy Gradient ($\mathtt{RSD4}$), which is a data-driven method based on a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) formulation. $\mathtt{RSD4}$ guarantees resource and delay constraints by Lagrangian dual and delay-sensitive queues, respectively. It also efficiently tackles partial observability with a memory mechanism enabled by the recurrent neural network (RNN) and introduces user-level decomposition and node-level merging to ensure scalability. Extensive experiments on simulated/real-world datasets demonstrate that $\mathtt{RSD4}$ is robust to system dynamics and partially observable environments, and achieves superior performances over existing DRL and non-DRL-based methods.


Distributed Ensembles of Reinforcement Learning Agents for Electricity Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract-- Deep Reinforcement Learning (or just "RL") is In this paper, we aim to answer them. Then, we aspects: intermittent nature of renewable energy, variations evaluate the computing cost of the building phase and the in demand, low storage abilities, [1] [2] significant room inference phase running on modern computing nodes. Deep This paper first demonstrates experimental evidence that Reinforcement Learning has shown great success in scaling homogeneous ensembles with averaging as a combination up model-free reinforcement learning algorithms to the rule are more performant and stabler than one individual RL challenging Markov Decision Processes [4] [5] and is a agent and other ensemble procedures. Second, we perform promising method to solve issues of electricity control [6]. Finally, due to the simplicity To alleviate this, we analyze and propose an ensemble of of the proposed procedure and the stabilization effects, our deep reinforcement learning agent procedures and discuss its experiments are easily reproducible.


Beyond Supervised Continual Learning: a Review

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Continual Learning (CL, sometimes also termed incremental learning) is a flavor of machine learning where the usual assumption of stationary data distribution is relaxed or omitted. When naively applying, e.g., DNNs in CL problems, changes in the data distribution can cause the so-called catastrophic forgetting (CF) effect: an abrupt loss of previous knowledge. Although many significant contributions to enabling CL have been made in recent years, most works address supervised (classification) problems. This article reviews literature that study CL in other settings, such as learning with reduced supervision, fully unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning.


Can Machine Learning Help Tackle Climate Change?

#artificialintelligence

Machine learning can help tackle climate change by looking at data to spot patterns and trends that are not recognisable to the human eye or are not practical for humans to monitor. For example, machine learning models enable automatic and continuous monitoring of global imagery to identify wildfires, landslides, and other visible phenomena using pattern and image recognition. Reinforcement learning allows the models to become increasingly accurate in identifying changes and hazards. These can then be identified and evaluated by an expert and forwarded to the relevant authority for mitigation.


Improving the Robustness of Reinforcement Learning Policies with $\mathcal{L}_{1}$ Adaptive Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A reinforcement learning (RL) control policy could fail in a new/perturbed environment that is different from the training environment, due to the presence of dynamic variations. For controlling systems with continuous state and action spaces, we propose an add-on approach to robustifying a pre-trained RL policy by augmenting it with an $\mathcal{L}_{1}$ adaptive controller ($\mathcal{L}_{1}$AC). Leveraging the capability of an $\mathcal{L}_{1}$AC for fast estimation and active compensation of dynamic variations, the proposed approach can improve the robustness of an RL policy which is trained either in a simulator or in the real world without consideration of a broad class of dynamic variations. Numerical and real-world experiments empirically demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in robustifying RL policies trained using both model-free and model-based methods.


Generalized Reinforcement Learning: Experience Particles, Action Operator, Reinforcement Field, Memory Association, and Decision Concepts

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Learning a control policy capable of adapting to time-varying and potentially evolving system dynamics has been a great challenge to the mainstream reinforcement learning (RL). Mainly, the ever-changing system properties would continuously affect how the RL agent interacts with the state space through its actions, which effectively (re-)introduces concept drifts to the underlying policy learning process. We postulated that higher adaptability for the control policy can be achieved by characterizing and representing actions with extra "degrees of freedom" and thereby, with greater flexibility, adjusts to variations from the action's "behavioral" outcomes, including how these actions get carried out in real time and the shift in the action set itself. This paper proposes a Bayesian-flavored generalized RL framework by first establishing the notion of parametric action model to better cope with uncertainty and fluid action behaviors, followed by introducing the notion of reinforcement field as a physics-inspired construct established through "polarized experience particles" maintained in the RL agent's working memory. These particles effectively encode the agent's dynamic learning experience that evolves over time in a self-organizing way. Using the reinforcement field as a substrate, we will further generalize the policy search to incorporate high-level decision concepts by viewing the past memory as an implicit graph structure, in which the memory instances, or particles, are interconnected with their degrees of associability/similarity defined and quantified such that the "associative memory" principle can be consistently applied to establish and augment the learning agent's evolving world model.


Learning Equilibria in Mean-Field Games: Introducing Mean-Field PSRO

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in multiagent learning have seen the introduction ofa family of algorithms that revolve around the population-based trainingmethod PSRO, showing convergence to Nash, correlated and coarse corre-lated equilibria. Notably, when the number of agents increases, learningbest-responses becomes exponentially more difficult, and as such ham-pers PSRO training methods. The paradigm of mean-field games pro-vides an asymptotic solution to this problem when the considered gamesare anonymous-symmetric. Unfortunately, the mean-field approximationintroduces non-linearities which prevent a straightforward adaptation ofPSRO. Building upon optimization and adversarial regret minimization,this paper sidesteps this issue and introduces mean-field PSRO, an adap-tation of PSRO which learns Nash, coarse correlated and correlated equi-libria in mean-field games. The key is to replace the exact distributioncomputation step by newly-defined mean-field no-adversarial-regret learn-ers, or by black-box optimization. We compare the asymptotic complexityof the approach to standard PSRO, greatly improve empirical bandit con-vergence speed by compressing temporal mixture weights, and ensure itis theoretically robust to payoff noise. Finally, we illustrate the speed andaccuracy of mean-field PSRO on several mean-field games, demonstratingconvergence to strong and weak equilibria.


A Hitchhiker's Guide to Statistical Comparisons of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Consistently checking the statistical significance of experimental results is the first mandatory step towards reproducible science. This paper presents a hitchhiker's guide to rigorous comparisons of reinforcement learning algorithms. After introducing the concepts of statistical testing, we review the relevant statistical tests and compare them empirically in terms of false positive rate and statistical power as a function of the sample size (number of seeds) and effect size. We further investigate the robustness of these tests to violations of the most common hypotheses (normal distributions, same distributions, equal variances). Beside simulations, we compare empirical distributions obtained by running Soft-Actor Critic and Twin-Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient on Half-Cheetah. We conclude by providing guidelines and code to perform rigorous comparisons of RL algorithm performances.


Reinforcement Learning for Hardware Security: Opportunities, Developments, and Challenges

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning paradigm where an autonomous agent learns to make an optimal sequence of decisions by interacting with the underlying environment. The promise demonstrated by RL-guided workflows in unraveling electronic design automation problems has encouraged hardware security researchers to utilize autonomous RL agents in solving domain-specific problems. From the perspective of hardware security, such autonomous agents are appealing as they can generate optimal actions in an unknown adversarial environment. On the other hand, the continued globalization of the integrated circuit supply chain has forced chip fabrication to off-shore, untrustworthy entities, leading to increased concerns about the security of the hardware. Furthermore, the unknown adversarial environment and increasing design complexity make it challenging for defenders to detect subtle modifications made by attackers (a.k.a. hardware Trojans). In this brief, we outline the development of RL agents in detecting hardware Trojans, one of the most challenging hardware security problems. Additionally, we outline potential opportunities and enlist the challenges of applying RL to solve hardware security problems.