Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Reinforcement Learning


Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Dynamic Pricing of Express Lanes with Multiple Access Locations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This article develops a deep reinforcement learning (Deep-RL) framework for dynamic pricing on managed lanes with multiple access locations and heterogeneity in travelers' value of time, origin, and destination. This framework relaxes assumptions in the literature by considering multiple origins and destinations, multiple access locations to the managed lane, en route diversion of travelers, partial observability of the sensor readings, and stochastic demand and observations. The problem is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and policy gradient methods are used to determine tolls as a function of real-time observations. Tolls are modeled as continuous and stochastic variables, and are determined using a feedforward neural network. The method is compared against a feedback control method used for dynamic pricing. We show that Deep-RL is effective in learning toll policies for maximizing revenue, minimizing total system travel time, and other joint weighted objectives, when tested on real-world transportation networks. The Deep-RL toll policies outperform the feedback control heuristic for the revenue maximization objective by generating revenues up to 9.5% higher than the heuristic and for the objective minimizing total system travel time (TSTT) by generating TSTT up to 10.4% lower than the heuristic. We also propose reward shaping methods for the POMDP to overcome the undesired behavior of toll policies, like the jam-and-harvest behavior of revenue-maximizing policies. Additionally, we test transferability of the algorithm trained on one set of inputs for new input distributions and offer recommendations on real-time implementations of Deep-RL algorithms. The source code for our experiments is available online at https://github.com/venktesh22/ExpressLanes_Deep-RL


Q-Learning Based Aerial Base Station Placement for Fairness Enhancement in Mobile Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this paper, we use an aerial base station (aerial-BS) to enhance fairness in a dynamic environment with user mobility. The problem of optimally placing the aerial-BS is a non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) problem. Moreover, the network topology is subject to continuous changes due to the user mobility. These issues intensify the quest to develop an adaptive and fast algorithm for 3D placement of the aerial-BS. To this end, we propose a method based on reinforcement learning to achieve these goals. Simulation results show that our method increases fairness among users in a reasonable computing time, while the solution is comparatively close to the optimal solution obtained by exhaustive search.


Reinforcement Learning and Video Games

arXiv.org Machine Learning

As one part of them, Reinforcement Learning has achieved incredible results in game playing. An intelligent agent will be created and trained with reinforcement learning algorithms to fulfill this tasks. In the Future of Go Summit 2017, Alpha Go which is an AI player trained with deep reinforcement learning algorithms won three games against the world best human player in Go. The success of reinforcement learning in this area shock the world and many researches are launched such as driverless cars. Deep learning methods such as convolutional neural network contributes a lot to this because these techniques solves the problem of dealing with high dimension input data and feature extraction. T-rex Runner is a dinosaur game from Google Chrome offline mode. The aim of the player is to escape all obstacles and get higher score until reaching the limitation which is 99999. The moving speed of the obstacles will increase as time goes by which make it difficult to get the highest score. The code of this project can be found in this link which is written in Python.


A Multistep Lyapunov Approach for Finite-Time Analysis of Biased Stochastic Approximation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Motivated by the widespread use of temporal-difference (TD-) and Q-learning algorithms in reinforcement learning, this paper studies a class of biased stochastic approximation (SA) procedures under a mild "ergodic-like" assumption on the underlying stochastic noise sequence. Building upon a carefully designed multistep Lyapunov function that looks ahead to several future updates to accommodate the stochastic perturbations (for control of the gradient bias), we prove a general result on the convergence of the iterates, and use it to derive non-asymptotic bounds on the mean-square error in the case of constant stepsizes. This novel looking-ahead viewpoint renders finite-time analysis of biased SA algorithms under a large family of stochastic perturbations possible. For direct comparison with existing contributions, we also demonstrate these bounds by applying them to TD- and Q-learning with linear function approximation, under the practical Markov chain observation model. The resultant finite-time error bound for both the TD- as well as the Q-learning algorithms is the first of its kind, in the sense that it holds i) for the unmodified versions (i.e., without making any modifications to the parameter updates) using even nonlinear function approximators; as well as for Markov chains ii) under general mixing conditions and iii) starting from any initial distribution, at least one of which has to be violated for existing results to be applicable.


High efficiency rl agent

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Now a day, model free algorithm achieve state of art performance on many RL problems, but the low efficiency of model free algorithm limited the usage. We combine model base RL, soft actor-critic framework, and curiosity. proposed an agent called RMC, giving a promise way to achieve good performance while maintain data efficiency. We suppress the performance of SAC and achieve state of the art performance, both on efficiency and stability. Meanwhile we can solving POMDP problem and achieve great generalization from MDP to POMDP.


A Deep Learning Approach to Grasping the Invisible

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Y ang Y ang 1, Hengyue Liang 2 and Changhyun Choi 2 Abstract -- We introduce a new problem named "grasping the invisible", where a robot is tasked to grasp an initially invisible target object via a sequence of nonprehensile (e.g., pushing) and prehensile (e.g., grasping) actions. In this problem, nonprehensile actions are needed to search for the target and rearrange cluttered objects around it. We propose to solve the problem by formulating a deep reinforcement learning approach in an actor-critic format. A critic that maps both the visual observations and the target information to expected rewards of actions is learned via deep Q-learning for instance pushing and grasping. Two actors are proposed to take in the critic predictions and the domain knowledge for two subtasks: a Bayesian-based actor accounting for past experience performs explorational pushing to search for the target; once the target is found, a classifier-based actor coordinates the target-oriented pushing and grasping to grasp the target in clutter . The model is entirely self-supervised through the robot-environment interactions. Our system achieves 93% and 87% task success rate on the two subtasks in simulation and 85% task success rate in real robot experiments, which outperforms several baselines by large margins. Supplementary material is available at: https://sites.google.com/umn.edu/grasping-invisible. Index T erms -- Dexterous Manipulation, Deep Learning in Robotics and Automation, Computer Vision for Automation I. INTRODUCTION Imagine what happens when a young kid is looking for a specific toy block buried in clutter, as shown in Figure 1a. He or she may first push down the pile of the blocks and luckily spot the target block in clutter, then push around it to make a space for the fingers (we refer to this type of motion as "singulation" [1]) and finally grasp it. We have wondered if an intelligent agent can perform such a task.


MAT: Multi-Fingered Adaptive Tactile Grasping via Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision-based grasping systems typically adopt an open-loop execution of a planned grasp. This policy can fail due to many reasons, including ubiquitous calibration error. Recovery from a failed grasp is further complicated by visual occlusion, as the hand is usually occluding the vision sensor as it attempts another open-loop regrasp. This work presents MAT, a tactile closed-loop method capable of realizing grasps provided by a coarse initial positioning of the hand above an object. Our algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimized through the clipped surrogate objective within a maximum entropy RL framework to balance exploitation and exploration. The method utilizes tactile and proprioceptive information to act through both fine finger motions and larger regrasp movements to execute stable grasps. A novel curriculum of action motion magnitude makes learning more tractable and helps turn common failure cases into successes. Careful selection of features that exhibit small sim-to-real gaps enables this tactile grasping policy, trained purely in simulation, to transfer well to real world environments without the need for additional learning. Experimentally, this methodology improves over a vision-only grasp success rate substantially on a multi-fingered robot hand. When this methodology is used to realize grasps from coarse initial positions provided by a vision-only planner, the system is made dramatically more robust to calibration errors in the camera-robot transform.


Discovery of Useful Questions as Auxiliary Tasks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Arguably, intelligent agents ought to be able to discover their own questions so that in learning answers for them they learn unanticipated useful knowledge and skills; this departs from the focus in much of machine learning on agents learning answers to externally defined questions. We present a novel method for a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to discover questions formulated as general value functions or GVFs, a fairly rich form of knowledge representation. Specifically, our method uses non-myopic meta-gradients to learn GVF-questions such that learning answers to them, as an auxiliary task, induces useful representations for the main task faced by the RL agent. We demonstrate that auxiliary tasks based on the discovered GVFs are sufficient, on their own, to build representations that support main task learning, and that they do so better than popular hand-designed auxiliary tasks from the literature. Furthermore, we show, in the context of Atari 2600 videogames, how such auxiliary tasks, meta-learned alongside the main task, can improve the data efficiency of an actor-critic agent.


Partner Approximating Learners (PAL): Simulation-Accelerated Learning with Explicit Partner Modeling in Multi-Agent Domains

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mixed cooperative-competitive control scenarios such as human-machine interaction with individual goals of the interacting partners are very challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In order to contribute towards intuitive human-machine collaboration, we focus on problems in the continuous state and control domain where no explicit communication is considered and the agents do not know the others' goals or control laws but only sense their control inputs retrospectively. Our proposed framework combines a learned partner model based on online data with a reinforcement learning agent that is trained in a simulated environment including the partner model. Thus, we overcome drawbacks of independent learners and, in addition, benefit from a reduced amount of real world data required for reinforcement learning which is vital in the human-machine context. We finally analyze an example that demonstrates the merits of our proposed framework which learns fast due to the simulated environment and adapts to the continuously changing partner due to the partner approximation. Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Mixed Cooperative-Competitive Control, Opponent Modeling.


Deep Reinforcement Learning for Control of Probabilistic Boolean Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Probabilistic Boolean Networks (PBNs) were introduced as a computational model for studying gene interactions in Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs). Controllability of PBNs, and hence GRNs, is the process of making strategic interventions to a network in order to drive it from a particular state towards some other potentially more desirable state. This is of significant importance to systems biology as successful control could be used to obtain potential gene treatments by making therapeutic interventions. Recent advancements in Deep Reinforcement Learning have enabled systems to develop policies merely by interacting with the environment, without complete knowledge of the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this paper we have implemented a Deep Q Network with Double Q Learning, that directly interacts with the environment -that is, a Probabilistic Boolean Network. Our approach develops a control policy by sampling experiences obtained from the environment using Prioritized Experience Replay which successfully drives a PBN from any state towards the desired one. This novel approach sets the foundations for overcoming the inability to scale to larger PBNs and opens up the spectrum in which to consider control of GRNs without the need of a computational model, i.e. by direct interventions to the GRN.