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 reinforcement learning


NetworkGym: Reinforcement Learning Environments for Multi-Access Traffic Management in Network Simulation (Supplementary Material)

Neural Information Processing Systems

We make use of four internal 12 GB NVIDIA TITAN Xp GPUs to perform our experiments. At initialization of each environment, four UEs are randomly stationed 1.5 meters above the The LTE base station lies at (x, z) = (40m, 3m). The only change in the configuration file between episodes is the random_seed parameter. We use random seed values from 0 to 63, inclusive, for this parameter. We store the resulting three offline datasets in the NetworkAgent/buffers directory.


NetworkGym: Reinforcement Learning Environments for Multi-Access Traffic Management in Network Simulation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets can often connect to multiple access networks (e.g., Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G) simultaneously. Recent advancements facilitate seamless integration of these connections below the transport layer, enhancing the experience for apps that lack inherent multi-path support. This optimization hinges on dynamically determining the traffic distribution across networks for each device, a process referred to as multi-access traffic splitting. This paper introduces NetworkGym, a high-fidelity network environment simulator that facilitates generating multiple network traffic flows and multiaccess traffic splitting.


Regularized Anderson Acceleration for Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been widely used for a range of complex control tasks. However, slow convergence and sample inefficiency remain challenging problems in RL, especially when handling continuous and high-dimensional state spaces. To tackle this problem, we propose a general acceleration method for model-free, off-policy deep RL algorithms by drawing the idea underlying regularized Anderson acceleration (RAA), which is an effective approach to accelerating the solving of fixed point problems with perturbations. Specifically, we first explain how policy iteration can be applied directly with Anderson acceleration. Then we extend RAA to the case of deep RL by introducing a regularization term to control the impact of perturbation induced by function approximation errors. We further propose two strategies, i.e., progressive update and adaptive restart, to enhance the performance. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated on a variety of benchmark tasks, including Atari 2600 and MuJoCo. Experimental results show that our approach substantially improves both the learning speed and final performance of state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms. The code and models are available at: https://github.com/shiwj16/raa-drl.


Off-Policy Evaluation via Off-Policy Classification Alex Irpan

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment. However, comparing models in a real-world environment for the purposes of early stopping or hyperparameter tuning is costly and often practically infeasible. This leads us to examine off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) in such settings. We focus on OPE for value-based methods, which are of particular interest in deep RL, with applications like robotics, where off-policy algorithms based on Q-function estimation can often attain better sample complexity than direct policy optimization. Existing OPE metrics either rely on a model of the environment, or the use of importance sampling (IS) to correct for the data being off-policy.


Multi-Reward Best Policy Identification Filippo Vannella Ericsson AB

Neural Information Processing Systems

Rewards are a critical aspect of formulating Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems; often, one may be interested in testing multiple reward functions, or the problem may naturally involve multiple rewards. In this study, we investigate the Multi-Reward Best Policy Identification (MR-BPI) problem, where the goal is to determine the best policy for all rewards in a given set R with minimal sample complexity and a prescribed confidence level. We derive a fundamental instancespecific lower bound on the sample complexity required by any Probably Correct (PC) algorithm in this setting. This bound guides the design of an optimal exploration policy attaining minimal sample complexity. However, this lower bound involves solving a hard non-convex optimization problem. We address this challenge by devising a convex approximation, enabling the design of sample-efficient algorithms. We propose MR-NaS, a PC algorithm with competitive performance on hard-exploration tabular environments. Extending this approach to Deep RL (DRL), we also introduce DBMR-BPI, an efficient algorithm for model-free exploration in multi-reward settings.


E-Motion: Future Motion Simulation via Event Sequence Diffusion

Neural Information Processing Systems

Forecasting a typical object's future motion is a critical task for interpreting and interacting with dynamic environments in computer vision. Event-based sensors, which could capture changes in the scene with exceptional temporal granularity, may potentially offer a unique opportunity to predict future motion with a level of detail and precision previously unachievable. Inspired by that, we propose to integrate the strong learning capacity of the video diffusion model with the rich motion information of an event camera as a motion simulation framework. Specifically, we initially employ pre-trained stable video diffusion models to adapt the event sequence dataset.


Self-Labeling the Job Shop Scheduling Problem

Neural Information Processing Systems

This work proposes a self-supervised training strategy designed for combinatorial problems. An obstacle in applying supervised paradigms to such problems is the need for costly target solutions often produced with exact solvers. Inspired by semi-and self-supervised learning, we show that generative models can be trained by sampling multiple solutions and using the best one according to the problem objective as a pseudo-label. In this way, we iteratively improve the model generation capability by relying only on its self-supervision, eliminating the need for optimality information. We validate this Self-Labeling Improvement Method (SLIM) on the Job Shop Scheduling (JSP), a complex combinatorial problem that is receiving much attention from the neural combinatorial community. We propose a generative model based on the well-known Pointer Network and train it with SLIM. Experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate the potential of this approach as the resulting models outperform constructive heuristics and state-of-the-art learning proposals for the JSP. Lastly, we prove the robustness of SLIM to various parameters and its generality by applying it to the Traveling Salesman Problem.


Learning Transferable Graph Exploration

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper considers the problem of efficient exploration of unseen environments, a key challenge in AI. We propose a'learning to explore' framework where we learn a policy from a distribution of environments. At test time, presented with an unseen environment from the same distribution, the policy aims to generalize the exploration strategy to visit the maximum number of unique states in a limited number of steps. We particularly focus on environments with graph-structured state-spaces that are encountered in many important real-world applications like software testing and map building. We formulate this task as a reinforcement learning problem where the'exploration' agent is rewarded for transitioning to previously unseen environment states and employ a graph-structured memory to encode the agent's past trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is extremely effective for exploration of spatial maps; and when applied on the challenging problems of coverage-guided software-testing of domain-specific programs and real-world mobile applications, it outperforms methods that have been hand-engineered by human experts.


Reinforcing LLM Agents via Policy Optimization with Action Decomposition, Jun Wang

Neural Information Processing Systems

Language models as intelligent agents push the boundaries of sequential decisionmaking agents but struggle with limited knowledge of environmental dynamics and exponentially huge action space. Recent efforts like GLAM and TWOSOME manually constrain the action space to a restricted subset and employ reinforcement learning to align agents' knowledge with specific environments. However, they overlook fine-grained credit assignments for intra-action tokens, which is essential for efficient language agent optimization, and rely on human's prior knowledge to restrict action space. This paper proposes decomposing language agent optimization from the action level to the token level, offering finer supervision for each intra-action token and manageable optimization complexity in environments with unrestricted action spaces. Beginning with the simplification of flattening all actions, we theoretically explore the discrepancies between action-level optimization and this naive token-level optimization. We then derive the Bellman backup with Action Decomposition (BAD) to integrate credit assignments for both intra-action and inter-action tokens, effectively eliminating the discrepancies. Implementing BAD within the PPO algorithm, we introduce Policy Optimization with Action Decomposition (POAD). POAD benefits from a finer-grained credit assignment process and lower optimization complexity, leading to enhanced learning efficiency and generalization abilities in aligning language agents with interactive environments.


OPERA: Automatic Offline Policy Evaluation with Re-weighted Aggregates of Multiple Estimators Allen Nie 1 Christina J. Yuan

Neural Information Processing Systems

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a confident estimate of its performance can lead to costly, unsafe, or hazardous outcomes, especially in education and healthcare. Several OPE estimators have been proposed in the last decade, many of which have hyperparameters and require training. Unfortunately, choosing the best OPE algorithm for each task and domain is still unclear. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that adaptively blends a set of OPE estimators given a dataset without relying on an explicit selection using a statistical procedure. We prove that our estimator is consistent and satisfies several desirable properties for policy evaluation. Additionally, we demonstrate that when compared to alternative approaches, our estimator can be used to select higher-performing policies in healthcare and robotics. Our work contributes to improving ease of use for a general-purpose, estimator-agnostic, off-policy evaluation framework for offline RL.