We present a new practical framework based on deep reinforcement learning and decision-time planning for real-world vehicle repositioning on ride-hailing (a type of mobility-on-demand, MoD) platforms. Our approach learns the spatiotemporal state-value function using a batch training algorithm with deep value networks. The optimal repositioning action is generated on-demand through value-based policy search, which combines planning and bootstrapping with the value networks. For the large-fleet problems, we develop several algorithmic features that we incorporate into our framework and that we demonstrate to induce coordination among the algorithmically-guided vehicles. We benchmark our algorithm with baselines in a ride-hailing simulation environment to demonstrate its superiority in improving income efficiency meausred by income-per-hour. We have also designed and run a real-world experiment program with regular drivers on a major ride-hailing platform. We have observed significantly positive results on key metrics comparing our method with experienced drivers who performed idle-time repositioning based on their own expertise.
In a ride-hailing system, an optimal relocation of vacant vehicles can significantly reduce fleet idling time and balance the supply-demand distribution, enhancing system efficiency and promoting driver satisfaction and retention. Model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to dynamically learn the relocating policy by actively interacting with the intrinsic dynamics in large-scale ride-hailing systems. However, the issues of sparse reward signals and unbalanced demand and supply distribution place critical barriers in developing effective DRL models. Conventional exploration strategy (e.g., the $\epsilon$-greedy) may barely work under such an environment because of dithering in low-demand regions distant from high-revenue regions. This study proposes the deep relocating option policy (DROP) that supervises vehicle agents to escape from oversupply areas and effectively relocate to potentially underserved areas. We propose to learn the Laplacian embedding of a time-expanded relocation graph, as an approximation representation of the system relocation policy. The embedding generates task-agnostic signals, which in combination with task-dependent signals, constitute the pseudo-reward function for generating DROPs. We present a hierarchical learning framework that trains a high-level relocation policy and a set of low-level DROPs. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated using a custom-built high-fidelity simulator with real-world trip record data. We report that DROP significantly improves baseline models with 15.7% more hourly revenue and can effectively resolve the dithering issue in low-demand areas.
Large ride-hailing platforms, such as DiDi, Uber and Lyft, connect tens of thousands of vehicles in a city to millions of ride demands throughout the day, providing great promises for improving transportation efficiency through the tasks of order dispatching and vehicle repositioning. Existing studies, however, usually consider the two tasks in simplified settings that hardly address the complex interactions between the two, the real-time fluctuations between supply and demand, and the necessary coordinations due to the large-scale nature of the problem. In this paper we propose a unified value-based dynamic learning framework (V1D3) for tackling both tasks. At the center of the framework is a globally shared value function that is updated continuously using online experiences generated from real-time platform transactions. To improve the sample-efficiency and the robustness, we further propose a novel periodic ensemble method combining the fast online learning with a large-scale offline training scheme that leverages the abundant historical driver trajectory data. This allows the proposed framework to adapt quickly to the highly dynamic environment, to generalize robustly to recurrent patterns and to drive implicit coordinations among the population of managed vehicles. Extensive experiments based on real-world datasets show considerably improvements over other recently proposed methods on both tasks. Particularly, V1D3 outperforms the first prize winners of both dispatching and repositioning tracks in the KDD Cup 2020 RL competition, achieving state-of-the-art results on improving both total driver income and user experience related metrics.
Deep reinforcement learning suggests the promise of fully automated learning of robotic control policies that directly map sensory inputs to low-level actions. However, applying deep reinforcement learning methods on real-world robots is exceptionally difficult, due both to the sample complexity and, just as importantly, the sensitivity of such methods to hyperparameters. While hyperparameter tuning can be performed in parallel in simulated domains, it is usually impractical to tune hyperparameters directly on real-world robotic platforms, especially legged platforms like quadrupedal robots that can be damaged through extensive trial-and-error learning. In this paper, we develop a stable variant of the soft actor-critic deep reinforcement learning algorithm that requires minimal hyperparameter tuning, while also requiring only a modest number of trials to learn multilayer neural network policies. This algorithm is based on the framework of maximum entropy reinforcement learning, and automatically trades off exploration against exploitation by dynamically and automatically tuning a temperature parameter that determines the stochasticity of the policy. We show that this method achieves state-of-the-art performance on four standard benchmark environments. We then demonstrate that it can be used to learn quadrupedal locomotion gaits on a real-world Minitaur robot, learning to walk from scratch directly in the real world in two hours of training.
Recent studies have shown the vulnerability of reinforcement learning (RL) models in noisy settings. The sources of noises differ across scenarios. For instance, in practice, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise (e.g., when observed rewards are collected through sensors), and thus observed rewards may not be credible as a result. Also, in applications such as robotics, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm can be manipulated to produce arbitrary errors. In this paper, we consider noisy RL problems where observed rewards by RL agents are generated with a reward confusion matrix. We call such observed rewards as perturbed rewards. We develop an unbiased reward estimator aided robust RL framework that enables RL agents to learn in noisy environments while observing only perturbed rewards. Our framework draws upon approaches for supervised learning with noisy data. The core ideas of our solution include estimating a reward confusion matrix and defining a set of unbiased surrogate rewards. We prove the convergence and sample complexity of our approach. Extensive experiments on different DRL platforms show that policies based on our estimated surrogate reward can achieve higher expected rewards, and converge faster than existing baselines. For instance, the state-of-the-art PPO algorithm is able to obtain 67.5% and 46.7% improvements in average on five Atari games, when the error rates are 10% and 30% respectively.
Despite deep reinforcement learning has recently achieved great successes, however in multiagent environments, a number of challenges still remain. Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is commonly considered to suffer from the problem of non-stationary environments and exponentially increasing policy space. It would be even more challenging to learn effective policies in circumstances where the rewards are sparse and delayed over long trajectories. In this paper, we study Hierarchical Deep Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (hierarchical deep MARL) in cooperative multiagent problems with sparse and delayed rewards, where efficient multiagent learning methods are desperately needed. We decompose the original MARL problem into hierarchies and investigate how effective policies can be learned hierarchically in synchronous/asynchronous hierarchical MARL frameworks. Several hierarchical deep MARL architectures, i.e., Ind-hDQN, hCom and hQmix, are introduced for different learning paradigms. Moreover, to alleviate the issues of sparse experiences in high-level learning and non-stationarity in multiagent settings, we propose a new experience replay mechanism, named as Augmented Concurrent Experience Replay (ACER). We empirically demonstrate the effects and efficiency of our approaches in several classic Multiagent Trash Collection tasks, as well as in an extremely challenging team sports game, i.e., Fever Basketball Defense.
Autonomous urban driving navigation with complex multi-agent dynamics is under-explored due to the difficulty of learning an optimal driving policy. The traditional modular pipeline heavily relies on hand-designed rules and the pre-processing perception system while the supervised learning-based models are limited by the accessibility of extensive human experience. We present a general and principled Controllable Imitative Reinforcement Learning (CIRL) approach which successfully makes the driving agent achieve higher success rates based on only vision inputs in a high-fidelity car simulator. To alleviate the low exploration efficiency for large continuous action space that often prohibits the use of classical RL on challenging real tasks, our CIRL explores over a reasonably constrained action space guided by encoded experiences that imitate human demonstrations, building upon Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Moreover, we propose to specialize adaptive policies and steering-angle reward designs for different control signals (i.e. follow, straight, turn right, turn left) based on the shared representations to improve the model capability in tackling with diverse cases. Extensive experiments on CARLA driving benchmark demonstrate that CIRL substantially outperforms all previous methods in terms of the percentage of successfully completed episodes on a variety of goal-directed driving tasks. We also show its superior generalization capability in unseen environments. To our knowledge, this is the first successful case of the learned driving policy through reinforcement learning in the high-fidelity simulator, which performs better-than supervised imitation learning.
We introduce an approach for deep reinforcement learning (RL) that improves upon the efficiency, generalization capacity, and interpretability of conventional approaches through structured perception and relational reasoning. It uses self-attention to iteratively reason about the relations between entities in a scene and to guide a model-free policy. Our results show that in a novel navigation and planning task called Box-World, our agent finds interpretable solutions that improve upon baselines in terms of sample complexity, ability to generalize to more complex scenes than experienced during training, and overall performance. In the StarCraft II Learning Environment, our agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on six mini-games -- surpassing human grandmaster performance on four. By considering architectural inductive biases, our work opens new directions for overcoming important, but stubborn, challenges in deep RL.
This paper presents a new multi-objective deep reinforcement learning (MODRL) framework based on deep Q-networks. We propose the use of linear and non-linear methods to develop the MODRL framework that includes both single-policy and multi-policy strategies. The experimental results on two benchmark problems including the two-objective deep sea treasure environment and the three-objective mountain car problem indicate that the proposed framework is able to converge to the optimal Pareto solutions effectively. The proposed framework is generic, which allows implementation of different deep reinforcement learning algorithms in different complex environments. This therefore overcomes many difficulties involved with standard multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) methods existing in the current literature. The framework creates a platform as a testbed environment to develop methods for solving various problems associated with the current MORL. Details of the framework implementation can be referred to //www.deakin.edu.au/~thanhthi/drl.htm.
Meta-learning is a powerful tool that builds on multi-task learning to learn how to quickly adapt a model to new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms can acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by meta-learning prior tasks. The performance of meta-learning algorithms critically depends on the tasks available for meta-training: in the same way that supervised learning algorithms generalize best to test points drawn from the same distribution as the training points, meta-learning methods generalize best to tasks from the same distribution as the meta-training tasks. In effect, meta-reinforcement learning offloads the design burden from algorithm design to task design. If we can automate the process of task design as well, we can devise a meta-learning algorithm that is truly automated. In this work, we take a step in this direction, proposing a family of unsupervised meta-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning. We describe a general recipe for unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning, and describe an effective instantiation of this approach based on a recently proposed unsupervised exploration technique and model-agnostic meta-learning. We also discuss practical and conceptual considerations for developing unsupervised meta-learning methods. Our experimental results demonstrate that unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning effectively acquires accelerated reinforcement learning procedures without the need for manual task design, significantly exceeds the performance of learning from scratch, and even matches performance of meta-learning methods that use hand-specified task distributions.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.