Reinforcement Learning
Exploiting Deep Reinforcement Learning for Edge Caching in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems
Zhang, Yu, Chen, Shuaifei, Zhang, Jiayi
Cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output is promising to meet the stringent quality-of-experience (QoE) requirements of railway wireless communications by coordinating many successional access points (APs) to serve the onboard users coherently. A key challenge is how to deliver the desired contents timely due to the radical changing propagation environment caused by the growing train speed. In this paper, we propose to proactively cache the likely-requesting contents at the upcoming APs which perform the coherent transmission to reduce end-to-end delay. A long-term QoE-maximization problem is formulated and two cache placement algorithms are proposed. One is based on heuristic convex optimization (HCO) and the other exploits deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with soft actor-critic (SAC). Compared to the conventional benchmark, numerical results show the advantage of our proposed algorithms on QoE and hit probability. With the advanced DRL model, SAC outperforms HCO on QoE by predicting the user requests accurately.
Play with Emotion: Affect-Driven Reinforcement Learning
Barthet, Matthew, Khalifa, Ahmed, Liapis, Antonios, Yannakakis, Georgios N.
This paper introduces a paradigm shift by viewing the task of affect modeling as a reinforcement learning (RL) process. According to the proposed paradigm, RL agents learn a policy (i.e. affective interaction) by attempting to maximize a set of rewards (i.e. behavioral and affective patterns) via their experience with their environment (i.e. context). Our hypothesis is that RL is an effective paradigm for interweaving affect elicitation and manifestation with behavioral and affective demonstrations. Importantly, our second hypothesis-building on Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis-is that emotion can be the facilitator of decision-making. We test our hypotheses in a racing game by training Go-Blend agents to model human demonstrations of arousal and behavior; Go-Blend is a modified version of the Go-Explore algorithm which has recently showcased supreme performance in hard exploration tasks. We first vary the arousal-based reward function and observe agents that can effectively display a palette of affect and behavioral patterns according to the specified reward. Then we use arousal-based state selection mechanisms in order to bias the strategies that Go-Blend explores. Our findings suggest that Go-Blend not only is an efficient affect modeling paradigm but, more importantly, affect-driven RL improves exploration and yields higher performing agents, validating Damasio's hypothesis in the domain of games.
Dongwon Son
I am currently a PhD student in Graduate School of AI at KAIST. I am in Intelligent mobile-manipulation (IM 2) lab directed by Beomjoon Kim. I am interested in all the things related with creating an intelligent movement of the robot arm including physics simulation, rendering, vision, computational hardware, reinforcement learning, trajectory optimization and actuator. Previously, I obtained my Master Degree in mechanical engineering from Seoul National University under the guidance of Dongjun Lee, and my Bachelor Degree in mechanical engineering from Seoul National University. I also had worked full-time at Samsung Research, and Hanwha Techwin.
Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation using Reinforcement Learning: A Systematic Review
AlMahamid, Fadi, Grolinger, Katarina
There is an increasing demand for using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), known as drones, in different applications such as packages delivery, traffic monitoring, search and rescue operations, and military combat engagements. In all of these applications, the UAV is used to navigate the environment autonomously - without human interaction, perform specific tasks and avoid obstacles. Autonomous UAV navigation is commonly accomplished using Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents act as experts in a domain to navigate the environment while avoiding obstacles. Understanding the navigation environment and algorithmic limitations plays an essential role in choosing the appropriate RL algorithm to solve the navigation problem effectively. Consequently, this study first identifies the main UAV navigation tasks and discusses navigation frameworks and simulation software. Next, RL algorithms are classified and discussed based on the environment, algorithm characteristics, abilities, and applications in different UAV navigation problems, which will help the practitioners and researchers select the appropriate RL algorithms for their UAV navigation use cases. Moreover, identified gaps and opportunities will drive UAV navigation research.
Turning Mathematics Problems into Games: Reinforcement Learning and Gr\"obner bases together solve Integer Feasibility Problems
Can agents be trained to answer difficult mathematical questions by playing a game? We consider the integer feasibility problem, a challenge of deciding whether a system of linear equations and inequalities has a solution with integer values. This is a famous NP-complete problem with applications in many areas of Mathematics and Computer Science. Our paper describes a novel algebraic reinforcement learning framework that allows an agent to play a game equivalent to the integer feasibility problem. We explain how to transform the integer feasibility problem into a game over a set of arrays with fixed margin sums. The game starts with an initial state (an array), and by applying a legal move that leaves the margins unchanged, we aim to eventually reach a winning state with zeros in specific positions. To win the game the player must find a path between the initial state and a final terminal winning state if one exists. Finding such a winning state is equivalent to solving the integer feasibility problem. The key algebraic ingredient is a Gr\"obner basis of the toric ideal for the underlying axial transportation polyhedron. The Gr\"obner basis can be seen as a set of connecting moves (actions) of the game. We then propose a novel RL approach that trains an agent to predict moves in continuous space to cope with the large size of action space. The continuous move is then projected onto the set of legal moves so that the path always leads to valid states. As a proof of concept we demonstrate in experiments that our agent can play well the simplest version of our game for 2-way tables. Our work highlights the potential to train agents to solve non-trivial mathematical queries through contemporary machine learning methods used to train agents to play games.
Towards Interpretable Deep Reinforcement Learning Models via Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Xie, Sean, Vosoughi, Soroush, Hassanpour, Saeed
Artificial intelligence, particularly through recent advancements in deep learning, has achieved exceptional performances in many tasks in fields such as natural language processing and computer vision. In addition to desirable evaluation metrics, a high level of interpretability is often required for these models to be reliably utilized. Therefore, explanations that offer insight into the process by which a model maps its inputs onto its outputs are much sought-after. Unfortunately, the current black box nature of machine learning models is still an unresolved issue and this very nature prevents researchers from learning and providing explicative descriptions for a model's behavior and final predictions. In this work, we propose a novel framework utilizing Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning that can provide global explanations for decisions made by a Reinforcement Learning model and capture intuitive tendencies that the model follows by summarizing the model's decision-making process.
Approximate Nash Equilibrium Learning for n-Player Markov Games in Dynamic Pricing
We investigate Nash equilibrium learning in a competitive Markov Game (MG) environment, where multiple agents compete, and multiple Nash equilibria can exist. In particular, for an oligopolistic dynamic pricing environment, exact Nash equilibria are difficult to obtain due to the curse-of-dimensionality. We develop a new model-free method to find approximate Nash equilibria. Gradient-free black box optimization is then applied to estimate $\epsilon$, the maximum reward advantage of an agent unilaterally deviating from any joint policy, and to also estimate the $\epsilon$-minimizing policy for any given state. The policy-$\epsilon$ correspondence and the state to $\epsilon$-minimizing policy are represented by neural networks, the latter being the Nash Policy Net. During batch update, we perform Nash Q learning on the system, by adjusting the action probabilities using the Nash Policy Net. We demonstrate that an approximate Nash equilibrium can be learned, particularly in the dynamic pricing domain where exact solutions are often intractable.
Making Reinforcement Learning Work on Swimmer
Franceschetti, Maรซl, Lacoux, Coline, Ohouens, Ryan, Raffin, Antonin, Sigaud, Olivier
The swimmer environment is a standard benchmark in reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, it is often used in papers comparing or combining RL methods with direct policy search methods such as genetic algorithms or evolution strategies. A lot of these papers report poor performance on swimmer from RL methods and much better performance from direct policy search methods. In this technical report we show that the low performance of RL methods on swimmer simply comes from the inadequate tuning of an important hyper-parameter, the discount factor. Furthermore we show that, by setting this hyper-parameter to a correct value, the issue can be easily fixed. Finally, for a set of often used RL algorithms, we provide a set of successful hyper-parameters obtained with the Stable Baselines3 library and its RL Zoo.
Light-weight probing of unsupervised representations for Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Wancong, GX-Chen, Anthony, Sobal, Vlad, LeCun, Yann, Carion, Nicolas
Unsupervised visual representation learning offers the opportunity to leverage large corpora of unlabeled trajectories to form useful visual representations, which can benefit the training of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, evaluating the fitness of such representations requires training RL algorithms which is computationally intensive and has high variance outcomes. To alleviate this issue, we design an evaluation protocol for unsupervised RL representations with lower variance and up to 600x lower computational cost. Inspired by the vision community, we propose two linear probing tasks: predicting the reward observed in a given state, and predicting the action of an expert in a given state. These two tasks are generally applicable to many RL domains, and we show through rigorous experimentation that they correlate strongly with the actual downstream control performance on the Atari100k Benchmark. This provides a better method for exploring the space of pretraining algorithms without the need of running RL evaluations for every setting. Leveraging this framework, we further improve existing self-supervised learning (SSL) recipes for RL, highlighting the importance of the forward model, the size of the visual backbone, and the precise formulation of the unsupervised objective.
CH-MARL: A Multimodal Benchmark for Cooperative, Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Sharma, Vasu, Goyal, Prasoon, Lin, Kaixiang, Thattai, Govind, Gao, Qiaozi, Sukhatme, Gaurav S.
We propose a multimodal (vision-and-language) benchmark for cooperative and heterogeneous multi-agent learning. We introduce a benchmark multimodal dataset with tasks involving collaboration between multiple simulated heterogeneous robots in a rich multi-room home environment. We provide an integrated learning framework, multimodal implementations of state-of-the-art multi-agent reinforcement learning techniques, and a consistent evaluation protocol. Our experiments investigate the impact of different modalities on multi-agent learning performance. We also introduce a simple message passing method between agents. The results suggest that multimodality introduces unique challenges for cooperative multi-agent learning and there is significant room for advancing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods in such settings.