Reinforcement Learning
Learning Knowledge Graph-based World Models of Textual Environments
Ammanabrolu, Prithviraj, Riedl, Mark O.
World models improve a learning agent's ability to efficiently operate in interactive and situated environments. This work focuses on the task of building world models of text-based game environments. Text-based games, or interactive narratives, are reinforcement learning environments in which agents perceive and interact with the world using textual natural language. These environments contain long, multi-step puzzles or quests woven through a world that is filled with hundreds of characters, locations, and objects. Our world model learns to simultaneously: (1) predict changes in the world caused by an agent's actions when representing the world as a knowledge graph; and (2) generate the set of contextually relevant natural language actions required to operate in the world. We frame this task as a Set of Sequences generation problem by exploiting the inherent structure of knowledge graphs and actions and introduce both a transformer-based multi-task architecture and a loss function to train it. A zero-shot ablation study on never-before-seen textual worlds shows that our methodology significantly outperforms existing textual world modeling techniques as well as the importance of each of our contributions.
Modelling resource allocation in uncertain system environment through deep reinforcement learning
Reinforcement Learning has applications in field of mechatronics, robotics, and other resource-constrained control system. Problem of resource allocation is primarily solved using traditional predefined techniques and modern deep learning methods. The drawback of predefined and most deep learning methods for resource allocation is failing to meet the requirements in cases of uncertain system environment. We can approach problem of resource allocation in uncertain system environment alongside following certain criteria using deep reinforcement learning. Also, reinforcement learning has ability for adapting to new uncertain environment for prolonged period of time. The paper provides a detailed comparative analysis on various deep reinforcement learning methods by applying different components to modify architecture of reinforcement learning with use of noisy layers, prioritized replay, bagging, duelling networks, and other related combination to obtain improvement in terms of performance and reduction of computational cost. The paper identifies problem of resource allocation in uncertain environment could be effectively solved using Noisy Bagging duelling double deep Q network achieving efficiency of 97.7% by maximizing reward with significant exploration in given simulated environment for resource allocation.
Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Based Distributed Dynamic Spectrum Access in Cognitive Radio Networks
Tan, Xiang, Zhou, Li, Wang, Haijun, Sun, Yuli, Zhao, Haitao, Seet, Boon-Chong, Wei, Jibo, Leung, Victor C. M.
This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Abstract With the development of the 5G and Internet of Things, amounts of wireless devices need to share the limited spectrum resources. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a promising paradigm to remedy the problem of inef!cient spectrum utilization brought upon by the historical command-and-control approach to spectrum allocation. In this paper, we investigate the distributed DSA problem for multiuser in a typical multi-channel cognitive radio network. The problem is formulated as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), and we proposed a centralized off-line training and distributed on-line execution framework based on cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We employ the deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN) to address the partial observability of the state for each cognitive user. The ultimate goal is to learn a cooperative strategy which maximizes the sum throughput of cognitive radio network in distributed fashion without coordination information exchange between cognitive users. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 6193000305. X. Tan, L. Zhou, Y. Sun, H. Wang, H. Zhao and J. Wei are all with College of Electronic Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China (E-mail: {tanxiang, zhouli2035, haijunwang14, sunyuli19, haitaozhao, wjbhw}@nudt.edu.cn). Boon-Chong Seet is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland 1142, New Zealand (E-mail: boon-chong.seet@aut.ac.nz). Victor C. M. Leung is with Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (E-mail: vleung@ieee.org). 2 From the simulation results, we can observe that the proposed algorithm can converge fast and achieve almost the optimal performance. The future network is involving into the Internet of Everything.
A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach towards Pendulum Swing-up Problem based on TF-Agents
Bi, Yifei, Chen, Xinyi, Xiao, Caihui
Adapting the idea of training CartPole with Deep Q-learning agent, we are able to find a promising result that prevent the pole from falling down. The capacity of reinforcement learning (RL) to learn from the interaction between the environment and agent provides an optimal control strategy. In this paper, we aim to solve the classic pendulum swing-up problem that making the learned pendulum to be in upright position and balanced. Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm is introduced to operate over continuous action domain in this problem. Salient results of optimal pendulum are proved with increasing average return, decreasing loss, and live video in the code part.
Google: Explore its Next-Generation AI Innovations for Smart Future
Google AI has announced that its research team is working on designing next-generation AI chips for a smart future. A new AI model allows artificial agents to perform chip design that solves new aspects of any problem more efficiently with an artificial neural network. Google research team has claimed that this model has the potential to save thousands of hours of human effort for the next generation. The Reinforcement Learning agents can generate a chip floor plan within six hours with the new AI model. Google has also utilised the AI model to design Tensor Processing Units that run in multiple data centres to improve other AI performances.
Optical Tactile Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer via Real-to-Sim Tactile Image Translation
Church, Alex, Lloyd, John, Hadsell, Raia, Lepora, Nathan F.
Simulation has recently become key for deep reinforcement learning to safely and efficiently acquire general and complex control policies from visual and proprioceptive inputs. Tactile information is not usually considered despite its direct relation to environment interaction. In this work, we present a suite of simulated environments tailored towards tactile robotics and reinforcement learning. A simple and fast method of simulating optical tactile sensors is provided, where high-resolution contact geometry is represented as depth images. Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) is used to learn successful policies across all considered tasks. A data-driven approach enables translation of the current state of a real tactile sensor to corresponding simulated depth images. This policy is implemented within a real-time control loop on a physical robot to demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real policy transfer on several physically-interactive tasks requiring a sense of touch.
Offline RL Without Off-Policy Evaluation
Brandfonbrener, David, Whitney, William F., Ranganath, Rajesh, Bruna, Joan
Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) have taken an iterative actor-critic approach involving off-policy evaluation. In this paper we show that simply doing one step of constrained/regularized policy improvement using an on-policy Q estimate of the behavior policy performs surprisingly well. This one-step algorithm beats the previously reported results of iterative algorithms on a large portion of the D4RL benchmark. The simple one-step baseline achieves this strong performance without many of the tricks used by previously proposed iterative algorithms and is more robust to hyperparameters. We argue that the relatively poor performance of iterative approaches is a result of the high variance inherent in doing off-policy evaluation and magnified by the repeated optimization of policies against those high-variance estimates. In addition, we hypothesize that the strong performance of the one-step algorithm is due to a combination of favorable structure in the environment and behavior policy.
Contrastive Reinforcement Learning of Symbolic Reasoning Domains
Poesia, Gabriel, Dong, WenXin, Goodman, Noah
Abstract symbolic reasoning, as required in domains such as mathematics and logic, is a key component of human intelligence. Solvers for these domains have important applications, especially to computer-assisted education. But learning to solve symbolic problems is challenging for machine learning algorithms. Existing models either learn from human solutions or use hand-engineered features, making them expensive to apply in new domains. In this paper, we instead consider symbolic domains as simple environments where states and actions are given as unstructured text, and binary rewards indicate whether a problem is solved. This flexible setup makes it easy to specify new domains, but search and planning become challenging. We introduce four environments inspired by the Mathematics Common Core Curriculum, and observe that existing Reinforcement Learning baselines perform poorly. We then present a novel learning algorithm, Contrastive Policy Learning (ConPoLe) that explicitly optimizes the InfoNCE loss, which lower bounds the mutual information between the current state and next states that continue on a path to the solution. ConPoLe successfully solves all four domains. Moreover, problem representations learned by ConPoLe enable accurate prediction of the categories of problems in a real mathematics curriculum. Our results suggest new directions for reinforcement learning in symbolic domains, as well as applications to mathematics education.
Learned Belief Search: Efficiently Improving Policies in Partially Observable Settings
Hu, Hengyuan, Lerer, Adam, Brown, Noam, Foerster, Jakob
Search is an important tool for computing effective policies in single- and multi-agent environments, and has been crucial for achieving superhuman performance in several benchmark fully and partially observable games. However, one major limitation of prior search approaches for partially observable environments is that the computational cost scales poorly with the amount of hidden information. In this paper we present \emph{Learned Belief Search} (LBS), a computationally efficient search procedure for partially observable environments. Rather than maintaining an exact belief distribution, LBS uses an approximate auto-regressive counterfactual belief that is learned as a supervised task. In multi-agent settings, LBS uses a novel public-private model architecture for underlying policies in order to efficiently evaluate these policies during rollouts. In the benchmark domain of Hanabi, LBS can obtain 55% ~ 91% of the benefit of exact search while reducing compute requirements by $35.8 \times$ ~ $4.6 \times$, allowing it to scale to larger settings that were inaccessible to previous search methods.
Reinforcement Learning for Markovian Bandits: Is Posterior Sampling more Scalable than Optimism?
Gast, Nicolas, Gaujal, Bruno, Khun, Kimang
We study learning algorithms for the classical Markovian bandit problem with discount. We explain how to adapt PSRL [24] and UCRL2 [2] to exploit the problem structure. These variants are called MB-PSRL and MB-UCRL2. While the regret bound and runtime of vanilla implementations of PSRL and UCRL2 are exponential in the number of bandits, we show that the episodic regret of MB-PSRL and MB-UCRL2 is $\tilde O(S\sqrt{nK})$ where $K$ is the number of episodes, n is the number of bandits and S is the number of states of each bandit (the exact bound in $S$, $n$ and $K$ is given in the paper). Up to a factor $\sqrt S$, this matches the lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{SnK}$) that we also derive in the paper. MB-PSRL is also computationally efficient: its runtime is linear in the number of bandits. We further show that this linear runtime cannot be achieved by adapting classical non-Bayesian algorithms such as UCRL2 or UCBVI to Markovian bandit problems. Finally, we perform numerical experiments that confirm that MB-PSRL outperforms other existing algorithms in practice, both in terms of regret and of computation time.