Agents
Enhancing Spectrum Efficiency in 6G Satellite Networks: A GAIL-Powered Policy Learning via Asynchronous Federated Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Hassan, Sheikh Salman, Park, Yu Min, Tun, Yan Kyaw, Saad, Walid, Han, Zhu, Hong, Choong Seon
In this paper, a novel generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL)-powered policy learning approach is proposed for optimizing beamforming, spectrum allocation, and remote user equipment (RUE) association in NTNs. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods for wireless network optimization often rely on manually designed reward functions, which can require extensive parameter tuning. To overcome these limitations, we employ inverse RL (IRL), specifically leveraging the GAIL framework, to automatically learn reward functions without manual design. We augment this framework with an asynchronous federated learning approach, enabling decentralized multi-satellite systems to collaboratively derive optimal policies. The proposed method aims to maximize spectrum efficiency (SE) while meeting minimum information rate requirements for RUEs. To address the non-convex, NP-hard nature of this problem, we combine the many-to-one matching theory with a multi-agent asynchronous federated IRL (MA-AFIRL) framework. This allows agents to learn through asynchronous environmental interactions, improving training efficiency and scalability. The expert policy is generated using the Whale optimization algorithm (WOA), providing data to train the automatic reward function within GAIL. Simulation results show that the proposed MA-AFIRL method outperforms traditional RL approaches, achieving a $14.6\%$ improvement in convergence and reward value. The novel GAIL-driven policy learning establishes a novel benchmark for 6G NTN optimization.
Data Analysis in the Era of Generative AI
Inala, Jeevana Priya, Wang, Chenglong, Drucker, Steven, Ramos, Gonzalo, Dibia, Victor, Riche, Nathalie, Brown, Dave, Marshall, Dan, Gao, Jianfeng
This paper explores the potential of AI-powered tools to reshape data analysis, focusing on design considerations and challenges. We explore how the emergence of large language and multimodal models offers new opportunities to enhance various stages of data analysis workflow by translating high-level user intentions into executable code, charts, and insights. We then examine human-centered design principles that facilitate intuitive interactions, build user trust, and streamline the AI-assisted analysis workflow across multiple apps. Finally, we discuss the research challenges that impede the development of these AI-based systems such as enhancing model capabilities, evaluating and benchmarking, and understanding end-user needs.
Robo-CSK-Organizer: Commonsense Knowledge to Organize Detected Objects for Multipurpose Robots
Hidalgo, Rafael, Parron, Jesse, Varde, Aparna S., Wang, Weitian
In the rapidly evolving field of robotics, integration of commonsense knowledge (CSK) in AI systems is becoming highly crucial to enhance the decision-making capabilities of robots, especially in nextgeneration multipurpose environments. This paper presents Robo-CSK-Organizer, a pioneering system that employs CSK, via a classical knowledge base, to facilitate sophisticated task-based object organization helpful in multipurpose robots. Unlike systems relying solely on deep learning tools such as ChatGPT, our Robo-CSK-Organizer system stands out in various crucial aspects. This includes: (1) its ability to resolve ambiguities and maintain consistency in object placement; (2) its adaptability to diverse task-based classifications; and moreover, (3) its contributions to explainable AI (XAI), consequently helping to foster trust and human-robot collaboration. This system's efficacy is underlined by DETIC (DEtector with Image Classes), an advanced extension of Detectron2 for object identification; BLIP (Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training) for context discernment; and most vitally by the adaptation of ConceptNet, a well-grounded commonsense knowledge base for reasoning based on semantic as well as pragmatic knowledge. While we deploy ConceptNet to extract CSK, the process in Robo-CSK-Organizer is generic enough to be replicated with other state-of-the-art knowledge bases. Controlled experiments and real-world applications, synopsized in this paper, make Robo-CSK-Organizer demonstrate superior performance in placing objects in contextually relevant locations, highlighting its clear capacity for commonsense-guided decision-making closer to the thresholds of human cognition. Hence, Robo-CSK-Organizer makes valuable contributions to Robotics and AI.
Autonomous Network Defence using Reinforcement Learning
Foley, Myles, Hicks, Chris, Highnam, Kate, Mavroudis, Vasilios
In the network security arms race, the defender is significantly disadvantaged as they need to successfully detect and counter every malicious attack. In contrast, the attacker needs to succeed only once. To level the playing field, we investigate the effectiveness of autonomous agents in a realistic network defence scenario. We first outline the problem, provide the background on reinforcement learning and detail our proposed agent design. Using a network environment simulation, with 13 hosts spanning 3 subnets, we train a novel reinforcement learning agent and show that it can reliably defend continual attacks by two advanced persistent threat (APT) red agents: one with complete knowledge of the network layout and another which must discover resources through exploration but is more general.
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Dispatching in Material Handling Systems
Lee, Xian Yeow, Wang, Haiyan, Katsumata, Daisuke, Matsui, Takaharu, Gupta, Chetan
This paper proposes a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to learn dynamic dispatching strategies, which is crucial for optimizing throughput in material handling systems across diverse industries. To benchmark our method, we developed a material handling environment that reflects the complexities of an actual system, such as various activities at different locations, physical constraints, and inherent uncertainties. To enhance exploration during learning, we propose a method to integrate domain knowledge in the form of existing dynamic dispatching heuristics. Our experimental results show that our method can outperform heuristics by up to 7.4 percent in terms of median throughput. Additionally, we analyze the effect of different architectures on MARL performance when training multiple agents with different functions. We also demonstrate that the MARL agents performance can be further improved by using the first iteration of MARL agents as heuristics to train a second iteration of MARL agents. This work demonstrates the potential of applying MARL to learn effective dynamic dispatching strategies that may be deployed in real-world systems to improve business outcomes.
Explaining Explaining
Nirenburg, Sergei, McShane, Marjorie, Goodman, Kenneth W., Oruganti, Sanjay
Explanation is key to people having confidence in high-stakes AI systems. However, machine-learning-based systems -- which account for almost all current AI -- can't explain because they are usually black boxes. The explainable AI (XAI) movement hedges this problem by redefining "explanation". The human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) movement identifies the explanation-oriented needs of users but can't fulfill them because of its commitment to machine learning. In order to achieve the kinds of explanations needed by real people operating in critical domains, we must rethink how to approach AI. We describe a hybrid approach to developing cognitive agents that uses a knowledge-based infrastructure supplemented by data obtained through machine learning when applicable. These agents will serve as assistants to humans who will bear ultimate responsibility for the decisions and actions of the human-robot team. We illustrate the explanatory potential of such agents using the under-the-hood panels of a demonstration system in which a team of simulated robots collaborate on a search task assigned by a human.
A Survey on Offensive AI Within Cybersecurity
Girhepuje, Sahil, Verma, Aviral, Raina, Gaurav
As AI takes on pivotal roles in essential applications, like self-driving vehicles, healthcare diagnosis, and financial services, it becomes a tempting target for malicious actors [16]. This study aims to comprehensively explore the realm of offensive AI, shedding light on its multifaceted dimensions, the techniques involved, its consequences, and potential future implications. Cyberattacks have surged in both complexity and frequency. This is evidenced by the escalating costs associated with data breaches. In 2022, businesses incurred an average loss of $4.35 million, an increase of $0.11 million from the previous year and a 12.7% rise from 2020 [22]. Moreover, the volume of data breaches has reached historic highs, with approximately 15 million records exposed during the third quarter of 2022. Furthermore, the third quarter of 2022 witnessed an alarming 57,116 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks [78]. Against this backdrop, understanding and mitigating security risks in machine learning (ML) has emerged as a pivotal aspect of cybersecurity.
Learning Occlusion-aware Decision-making from Agent Interaction via Active Perception
Jia, Jie, Shu, Yiming, Gan, Zhongxue, Ding, Wenchao
Occlusion-aware decision-making is essential in autonomous driving due to the high uncertainty of various occlusions. Recent occlusion-aware decision-making methods encounter issues such as high computational complexity, scenario scalability challenges, or reliance on limited expert data. Benefiting from automatically generating data by exploration randomization, we uncover that reinforcement learning (RL) may show promise in occlusion-aware decision-making. However, previous occlusion-aware RL faces challenges in expanding to various dynamic and static occlusion scenarios, low learning efficiency, and lack of predictive ability. To address these issues, we introduce Pad-AI, a self-reinforcing framework to learn occlusion-aware decision-making through active perception. Pad-AI utilizes vectorized representation to represent occluded environments efficiently and learns over the semantic motion primitives to focus on high-level active perception exploration. Furthermore, Pad-AI integrates prediction and RL within a unified framework to provide risk-aware learning and security guarantees. Our framework was tested in challenging scenarios under both dynamic and static occlusions and demonstrated efficient and general perception-aware exploration performance to other strong baselines in closed-loop evaluations.
A Fairness-Driven Method for Learning Human-Compatible Negotiation Strategies
Despite recent advancements in AI and NLP, negotiation remains a difficult domain for AI agents. Traditional game theoretic approaches that have worked well for two-player zero-sum games struggle in the context of negotiation due to their inability to learn human-compatible strategies. On the other hand, approaches that only use human data tend to be domain-specific and lack the theoretical guarantees provided by strategies grounded in game theory. Motivated by the notion of fairness as a criterion for optimality in general sum games, we propose a negotiation framework called FDHC which incorporates fairness into both the reward design and search to learn human-compatible negotiation strategies. Our method includes a novel, RL+search technique called LGM-Zero which leverages a pre-trained language model to retrieve human-compatible offers from large action spaces. Our results show that our method is able to achieve more egalitarian negotiation outcomes and improve negotiation quality.
Learning to Drive via Asymmetric Self-Play
Zhang, Chris, Biswas, Sourav, Wong, Kelvin, Fallah, Kion, Zhang, Lunjun, Chen, Dian, Casas, Sergio, Urtasun, Raquel
Large-scale data is crucial for learning realistic and capable driving policies. However, it can be impractical to rely on scaling datasets with real data alone. The majority of driving data is uninteresting, and deliberately collecting new long-tail scenarios is expensive and unsafe. We propose asymmetric self-play to scale beyond real data with additional challenging, solvable, and realistic synthetic scenarios. Our approach pairs a teacher that learns to generate scenarios it can solve but the student cannot, with a student that learns to solve them. When applied to traffic simulation, we learn realistic policies with significantly fewer collisions in both nominal and long-tail scenarios. Our policies further zero-shot transfer to generate training data for end-to-end autonomy, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art adversarial approaches, or using real data alone. For more information, visit https://waabi.ai/selfplay .