Reinforcement Learning
Artificial Intelligence Aided Next-Generation Networks Relying on UAVs
Liu, Xiao, Chen, Mingzhe, Liu, Yuanwei, Chen, Yue, Cui, Shuguang, Hanzo, Lajos
Artificial intelligence (AI) assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided next-generation networking is proposed for dynamic environments. In the AI-enabled UAV-aided wireless networks (UAWN), multiple UAVs are employed as aerial base stations, which are capable of rapidly adapting to the dynamic environment by collecting information about the users' position and tele-traffic demands, learning from the environment and acting upon the feedback received from the users. Moreover, AI enables the interaction amongst a swarm of UAVs for cooperative optimization of the system. As a benefit of the AI framework, several challenges of conventional UAWN may be circumvented, leading to enhanced network performance, improved reliability and agile adaptivity. As a further benefit, dynamic trajectory design and resource allocation are demonstrated. Finally, potential research challenges and opportunities are discussed.
Distal Explanations for Explainable Reinforcement Learning Agents
Madumal, Prashan, Miller, Tim, Sonenberg, Liz, Vetere, Frank
Causal explanations present an intuitive way to understand the course of events through causal chains, and are widely accepted in cognitive science as the prominent model humans use for explanation. Importantly, causal models can generate opportunity chains, which take the form of `A enables B and B causes C'. We ground the notion of opportunity chains in human-agent experimental data, where we present participants with explanations from different models and ask them to provide their own explanations for agent behaviour. Results indicate that humans do in-fact use the concept of opportunity chains frequently for describing artificial agent behaviour. Recently, action influence models have been proposed to provide causal explanations for model-free reinforcement learning (RL). While these models can generate counterfactuals---things that did not happen but could have under different conditions---they lack the ability to generate explanations of opportunity chains. We introduce a distal explanation model that can analyse counterfactuals and opportunity chains using decision trees and causal models. We employ a recurrent neural network to learn opportunity chains and make use of decision trees to improve the accuracy of task prediction and the generated counterfactuals. We computationally evaluate the model in 6 RL benchmarks using different RL algorithms, and show that our model performs better in task prediction. We report on a study with 90 participants who receive explanations of RL agents behaviour in solving three scenarios: 1) Adversarial; 2) Search and rescue; and 3) Human-Agent collaborative scenarios. We investigate the participants' understanding of the agent through task prediction and their subjective satisfaction of the explanations and show that our distal explanation model results in improved outcomes over the three scenarios compared with two baseline explanation models.
Towards Learning Multi-agent Negotiations via Self-Play
Making sophisticated, robust, and safe sequential decisions is at the heart of intelligent systems. This is especially critical for planning in complex multi-agent environments, where agents need to anticipate other agents' intentions and possible future actions. Traditional methods formulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process, but the solutions often rely on various assumptions and become brittle when presented with corner cases. In contrast, deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) has been very effective at finding policies by simultaneously exploring, interacting, and learning from environments. Leveraging the powerful Deep RL paradigm, we demonstrate that an iterative procedure of self-play can create progressively more diverse environments, leading to the learning of sophisticated and robust multi-agent policies. W e demonstrate this in a challenging multi-agent simulation of merging traffic, where agents must interact and negotiate with others in order to successfully merge on or off the road. While the environment starts off simple, we increase its complexity by iteratively adding an increasingly diverse set of agents to the agent "zoo" as training progresses. Qualitatively, we find that through self-play, our policies automatically learn interesting behaviors such as defensive driving, overtaking, yielding, and the use of signal lights to communicate intentions to other agents. In addition, quantitatively, we show a dramatic improvement of the success rate of merging maneuvers from 63% to over 98%.
Reinforcement Learning-based Autoscaling of Workflows in the Cloud: A Survey
Garรญ, Yisel, Monge, David A., Pacini, Elina, Mateos, Cristian, Garino, Carlos Garcรญa
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a great potential for automatically solving decision making problems in complex uncertain environments. Basically, RL proposes a computational approach that allows learning through interaction in an environment of stochastic behavior, with agents taking actions to maximize some cumulative short-term and long-term rewards. Some of the most impressive results have been shown in Game Theory where agents exhibited super-human performance in games like Go or Starcraft 2, which led to its adoption in many other domains including Cloud Computing. Particularly, workflow autoscaling exploits the Cloud elasticity to optimize the execution of workflows according to a given optimization criteria. This is a decision-making problem in which it is necessary to establish when and how to scale-up/down computational resources; and how to assign them to the upcoming processing workload. Such actions have to be taken considering some optimization criteria in the Cloud, a dynamic and uncertain environment. Motivated by this, many works apply RL to the autoscaling problem in Cloud. In this work we survey exhaustively those proposals from major venues, and uniformly compare them based on a set of proposed taxonomies. We also discuss open problems and provide a prospective of future research in the area.
Rotation, Translation, and Cropping for Zero-Shot Generalization
Ye, Chang, Khalifa, Ahmed, Bontrager, Philip, Togelius, Julian
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown impressive performance on domains with visual inputs, in particular various games. However, the agent is usually trained on a fixed environment, e.g. a fixed number of levels. A growing mass of evidence suggests that these trained models fail to generalize to even slight variations of the environments they were trained on. This paper advances the hypothesis that the lack of generalization is partly due to the input representation, and explores how rotation, cropping and translation could increase generality. We show that a cropped, translated and rotated observation can get better generalization on unseen levels of a two-dimensional arcade game. The generality of the agent is evaluated on a set of human-designed levels.
Some Insights into Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Systems
A lifelong reinforcement learning system is a learning system that has the ability to learn through trail-and-error interaction with the environment over its lifetime. In this paper, I give some arguments to show that the traditional reinforcement learning paradigm fails to model this type of learning system. Some insights into lifelong reinforcement learning are provided, along with a simplistic prototype lifelong reinforcement learning system.
Developing Multi-Task Recommendations with Long-Term Rewards via Policy Distilled Reinforcement Learning
Liu, Xi, Li, Li, Hsieh, Ping-Chun, Xie, Muhe, Ge, Yong, Chen, Rui
With the explosive growth of online products and content, recommendation techniques have been considered as an effective tool to overcome information overload, improve user experience, and boost business revenue. In recent years, we have observed a new desideratum of considering long-term rewards of multiple related recommendation tasks simultaneously. The consideration of long-term rewards is strongly tied to business revenue and growth. Learning multiple tasks simultaneously could generally improve the performance of individual task due to knowledge sharing in multi-task learning. While a few existing works have studied long-term rewards in recommendations, they mainly focus on a single recommendation task. In this paper, we propose {\it PoDiRe}: a \underline{po}licy \underline{di}stilled \underline{re}commender that can address long-term rewards of recommendations and simultaneously handle multiple recommendation tasks. This novel recommendation solution is based on a marriage of deep reinforcement learning and knowledge distillation techniques, which is able to establish knowledge sharing among different tasks and reduce the size of a learning model. The resulting model is expected to attain better performance and lower response latency for real-time recommendation services. In collaboration with Samsung Game Launcher, one of the world's largest commercial mobile game platforms, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study on large-scale real data with hundreds of millions of events and show that our solution outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of several standard evaluation metrics.
Adaptive Teaching of Temporal Logic Formulas to Learners with Preferences
Xu, Zhe, Chen, Yuxin, Topcu, Ufuk
Machine teaching is an algorithmic framework for teaching a target hypothesis via a sequence of examples or demonstrations. We investigate machine teaching for temporal logic formulas -- a novel and expressive hypothesis class amenable to time-related task specifications. In the context of teaching temporal logic formulas, an exhaustive search even for a myopic solution takes exponential time (with respect to the time span of the task). We propose an efficient approach for teaching parametric linear temporal logic formulas. Concretely, we derive a necessary condition for the minimal time length of a demonstration to eliminate a set of hypotheses. Utilizing this condition, we propose a myopic teaching algorithm by solving a sequence of integer programming problems. We further show that, under two notions of teaching complexity, the proposed algorithm has near-optimal performance. The results strictly generalize the previous results on teaching preference-based version space learners. We evaluate our algorithm extensively under a variety of learner types (i.e., learners with different preference models) and interactive protocols (e.g., batched and adaptive). The results show that the proposed algorithms can efficiently teach a given target temporal logic formula under various settings, and that there are significant gains of teaching efficacy when the teacher adapts to the learner's current hypotheses or uses oracles.
Challenges and Countermeasures for Adversarial Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning
Ilahi, Inaam, Usama, Muhammad, Qadir, Junaid, Janjua, Muhammad Umar, Al-Fuqaha, Ala, Hoang, Dinh Thai, Niyato, Dusit
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has numerous applications in the real world thanks to its outstanding ability in quickly adapting to the surrounding environments. Despite its great advantages, DRL is susceptible to adversarial attacks, which precludes its use in real-life critical systems and applications (e.g., smart grids, traffic controls, and autonomous vehicles) unless its vulnerabilities are addressed and mitigated. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive survey that discusses emerging attacks in DRL-based systems and the potential countermeasures to defend against these attacks. We first cover some fundamental backgrounds about DRL and present emerging adversarial attacks on machine learning techniques. We then investigate more details of the vulnerabilities that the adversary can exploit to attack DRL along with the state-of-the-art countermeasures to prevent such attacks. Finally, we highlight open issues and research challenges for developing solutions to deal with attacks for DRL-based intelligent systems.