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Class-wise Balancing Data Replay for Federated Class-Incremental Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Federated Class Incremental Learning (FCIL) aims to collaboratively process continuously increasing incoming tasks across multiple clients. Among various approaches, data replay has become a promising solution, which can alleviate forgetting by reintroducing representative samples from previous tasks. However, their performance is typically limited by class imbalance, both within the replay buffer due to limited global awareness and between replayed and newly arrived classes. To address this issue, we propose a class-wise balancing data replay method for FCIL (FedCBDR), which employs a global coordination mechanism for class-level memory construction and reweights the learning objective to alleviate the aforementioned imbalances. Specifically, FedCBDRhas two key components: 1) the global-perspective data replay module reconstructs global representations of prior task in a privacy-preserving manner, which then guides a class-aware and importance-sensitive sampling strategy to achieve balanced replay; 2) Subsequently, to handle class imbalance across tasks, the task-aware temperature scaling module adaptively adjusts the temperature of logits at both class and instance levels based on task dynamics, which reduces the model's overconfidence in majority classes while enhancing its sensitivity to minority classes. Experimental results verified that FedCBDR achieves balanced class-wise sampling under heterogeneous data distributions and improves generalization under task imbalance between earlier and recent tasks, yielding a 2%-15% Top-1 accuracy improvement over six stateof-the-art methods.


Beyond the Independence Assumption: Finite-Sample Guarantees for Deep Q-Learning under $ฯ„$-Mixing

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Finite-sample analyses of deep Q-learning typically treat replayed data as independent, even though it is sampled from temporally dependent state-action trajectories. We study the Deep Q-networks (DQN) algorithm under explicit dependence by modelling the minibatches used for updating the network as $ฯ„$-mixing. We show that this assumption holds under certain dependence conditions on the underlying trajectories and the mechanism used to sample minibatches. Building on this observation, we extend statistical analyses of DQN with fully connected ReLU architectures to dependent data. We formulate each update as a nonparametric regression problem with $ฯ„$-mixing observations and derive finite-sample risk bounds under this dependence structure. Our results show that temporal dependence leads to a degradation in the statistical rate by inducing an additional dimensionality penalty in the rate exponent, reflecting the reduced effective sample size of $ฯ„$-mixing data. Moreover, we derive the sample complexity of DQN under $tau$-mixing from these risk bounds. Finally, we empirically demonstrate on standard Gymnasium environments that the independence assumption is systematically violated and that replay sampling yields approximately exponentially decaying correlations, supporting our theoretical framework.



PALMER: Perception-Action Loop with Memory for Long-Horizon Planning

Neural Information Processing Systems

To achieve autonomy in a priori unknown real-world scenarios, agents should be able to: i) act from high-dimensional sensory observations (e.g., images), ii) learn from past experience to adapt and improve, and iii) be capable of long horizon planning.


5812f92450ccaf17275500841c70924a-Supplemental.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present a brief proof about the local optimality of one-hot encodings in the decision-theoretic framework presented in Section 3.2. We seek to prove that, under assumptions of an identity reward matrix, tokens constrained to a unit hypercube, and gaussian additive noise, one-hot tokens are an optimally robust communication strategy. We only seek to prove local optimality, as one many trivially generate multiple, equally optimal tokens by, for example, flipping all bits. The following derivation uses Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, a generalization of Lagrange multipliers [17]. We maximize the function, subject to constraints. T>j Ti Ti + ||Tj||2 Ti # ~ยตi + ~ฮปi = ~0 (13) (14) We seek to show that one-hot vectors are an optimum, so we now show that one-hot vectors indeed respect the constraints and set the derivatives to zero.


Checklist

Neural Information Processing Systems

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4547dff5fd7604f18c8ee32cf3da41d7-Supplemental.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

In training every agent we use a distributed framework for simulation and training. For simulation, we run 6400 Hanabi environments in parallel and the trajectories are batched together for efficient GPU computation. This is done efficiently as every thread can hold many environments in which many agents interact. Every agent chooses actions based on neural network calls, which are more intensive and done by GPUs. By doing these calls asynchronously it allows a thread to support multiple environments while waiting for prior agents' actions to be computed.


Sim and Real: Better Together

Neural Information Processing Systems

Simulation is used extensively in autonomous systems, particularly in robotic manipulation. By far, the most common approach is to train a controller in simulation, and then use it as an initial starting point for the real system. We demonstrate how to learn simultaneously from both simulation and interaction with the real environment. We propose an algorithm for balancing the large number of samples from the high throughput but less accurate simulation and the low-throughput, high-fidelity and costly samples from the real environment. We achieve that by maintaining a replay buffer for each environment the agent interacts with. We analyze such multi-environment interaction theoretically, and provide convergence properties, through a novel theoretical replay buffer analysis. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on a sim-to-real environment.


Learning World Models for Unconstrained Goal Navigation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning world models offers a promising avenue for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. By allowing agents to plan actions or exploratory goals without direct interaction with the environment, world models enhance exploration efficiency. The quality of a world model hinges on the richness of data stored in the agent's replay buffer, with expectations of reasonable generalization across the state space surrounding recorded trajectories. However, challenges arise in generalizing learned world models to state transitions backward along recorded trajectories or between states across different trajectories, hindering their ability to accurately model real-world dynamics. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel goal-directed exploration algorithm, MUN (short for World Models for Unconstrained Goal Navigation). This algorithm is capable of modeling state transitions between arbitrary subgoal states in the replay buffer, thereby facilitating the learning of policies to navigate between any key states. Experimental results demonstrate that MUN strengthens the reliability of world models and significantly improves the policy's capacity to generalize across new goal settings.


Deep Policy Gradient Methods Without Batch Updates, Target Networks, or Replay Buffers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modern deep policy gradient methods achieve effective performance on simulated robotic tasks, but they all require large replay buffers or expensive batch updates, or both, making them incompatible for real systems with resource-limited computers. We show that these methods fail catastrophically when limited to small replay buffers or during, where updates only use the most recent sample without batch updates or a replay buffer. We propose a novel incremental deep policy gradient method --- and a set of normalization and scaling techniques to address the challenges of instability in incremental learning. On robotic simulation benchmarks, we show that AVG is the only incremental method that learns effectively, often achieving final performance comparable to batch policy gradient methods. This advancement enabled us to show for the first time effective deep reinforcement learning with real robots using only incremental updates, employing a robotic manipulator and a mobile robot.