The rapid development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) holds vast potential for transportation systems through improved safety, efficiency, and access to mobility. However, the progression of these impacts, as AVs are adopted, is not well understood. Numerous technical challenges arise from the goal of analyzing the partial adoption of autonomy: partial control and observation, multi-vehicle interactions, and the sheer variety of scenarios represented by real-world networks. To shed light into near-term AV impacts, this article studies the suitability of deep reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming these challenges in a low AV-adoption regime. A modular learning framework is presented, which leverages deep RL to address complex traffic dynamics. Modules are composed to capture common traffic phenomena (stop-and-go traffic jams, lane changing, intersections). Learned control laws are found to improve upon human driving performance, in terms of system-level velocity, by up to 57% with only 4-7% adoption of AVs. Furthermore, in single-lane traffic, a small neural network control law with only local observation is found to eliminate stop-and-go traffic - surpassing all known model-based controllers to achieve near-optimal performance - and generalize to out-of-distribution traffic densities.
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying Markov random processes parameterized by the underlying optimization variable. These time-varying samples make gradient directions in our update biased and dependent, which can potentially lead to the divergence of the iterates. In our two-time-scale approach, one scale is to estimate the true gradient from these samples, which is then used to update the estimate of the optimal solution. While these two iterates are implemented simultaneously, the former is updated "faster" (using bigger step sizes) than the latter (using smaller step sizes). Our first contribution is to characterize the finite-time complexity of the proposed two-time-scale stochastic gradient method. In particular, we provide explicit formulas for the convergence rates of this method under different structural assumptions, namely, strong convexity, convexity, the Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition, and general non-convexity. We apply our framework to two problems in control and reinforcement learning. First, we look at the standard online actor-critic algorithm over finite state and action spaces and derive a convergence rate of O(k^(-2/5)), which recovers the best known rate derived specifically for this problem. Second, we study an online actor-critic algorithm for the linear-quadratic regulator and show that a convergence rate of O(k^(-2/3)) is achieved. This is the first time such a result is known in the literature. Finally, we support our theoretical analysis with numerical simulations where the convergence rates are visualized.
Operator learning for complex nonlinear operators is increasingly common in modeling physical systems. However, training machine learning methods to learn such operators requires a large amount of expensive, high-fidelity data. In this work, we present a composite Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) for learning using two datasets with different levels of fidelity, to accurately learn complex operators when sufficient high-fidelity data is not available. Additionally, we demonstrate that the presence of low-fidelity data can improve the predictions of physics-informed learning with DeepONets.
Deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch provide a productive interface for expressing and training a deep neural network (DNN) model on a single device or using data parallelism. Still, they may not be flexible or efficient enough in training emerging large models on distributed devices, which require more sophisticated parallelism beyond data parallelism. Plugins or wrappers have been developed to strengthen these frameworks for model or pipeline parallelism, but they complicate the usage and implementation of distributed deep learning. Aiming at a simple, neat redesign of distributed deep learning frameworks for various parallelism paradigms, we present OneFlow, a novel distributed training framework based on an SBP (split, broadcast and partial-value) abstraction and the actor model. SBP enables much easier programming of data parallelism and model parallelism than existing frameworks, and the actor model provides a succinct runtime mechanism to manage the complex dependencies imposed by resource constraints, data movement and computation in distributed deep learning. We demonstrate the general applicability and efficiency of OneFlow for training various large DNN models with case studies and extensive experiments. The results show that OneFlow outperforms many well-known customized libraries built on top of the state-of-the-art frameworks. The code of OneFlow is available at: //github.com/Oneflow-Inc/oneflow.
Autonomous driving is an active research topic in both academia and industry. However, most of the existing solutions focus on improving the accuracy by training learnable models with centralized large-scale data. Therefore, these methods do not take into account the user's privacy. In this paper, we present a new approach to learn autonomous driving policy while respecting privacy concerns. We propose a peer-to-peer Deep Federated Learning (DFL) approach to train deep architectures in a fully decentralized manner and remove the need for central orchestration. We design a new Federated Autonomous Driving network (FADNet) that can improve the model stability, ensure convergence, and handle imbalanced data distribution problems while is being trained with federated learning methods. Intensively experimental results on three datasets show that our approach with FADNet and DFL achieves superior accuracy compared with other recent methods. Furthermore, our approach can maintain privacy by not collecting user data to a central server.
Distributed machine learning (ML) can bring more computational resources to bear than single-machine learning, thus enabling reductions in training time. Distributed learning partitions models and data over many machines, allowing model and dataset sizes beyond the available compute power and memory of a single machine. In practice though, distributed ML is challenging when distribution is mandatory, rather than chosen by the practitioner. In such scenarios, data could unavoidably be separated among workers due to limited memory capacity per worker or even because of data privacy issues. There, existing distributed methods will utterly fail due to dominant transfer costs across workers, or do not even apply. We propose a new approach to distributed fully connected neural network learning, called independent subnet training (IST), to handle these cases. In IST, the original network is decomposed into a set of narrow subnetworks with the same depth. These subnetworks are then trained locally before parameters are exchanged to produce new subnets and the training cycle repeats. Such a naturally "model parallel" approach limits memory usage by storing only a portion of network parameters on each device. Additionally, no requirements exist for sharing data between workers (i.e., subnet training is local and independent) and communication volume and frequency are reduced by decomposing the original network into independent subnets. These properties of IST can cope with issues due to distributed data, slow interconnects, or limited device memory, making IST a suitable approach for cases of mandatory distribution. We show experimentally that IST results in training times that are much lower than common distributed learning approaches.
The concept of federated learning (FL) was first proposed by Google in 2016. Thereafter, FL has been widely studied for the feasibility of application in various fields due to its potential to make full use of data without compromising the privacy. However, limited by the capacity of wireless data transmission, the employment of federated learning on mobile devices has been making slow progress in practical. The development and commercialization of the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks has shed some light on this. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of existing federated learning schemes for mobile devices and propose a novel cross-device federated learning framework, which utilizes the anonymous communication technology and ring signature to protect the privacy of participants while reducing the computation overhead of mobile devices participating in FL. In addition, our scheme implements a contribution-based incentive mechanism to encourage mobile users to participate in FL. We also give a case study of autonomous driving. Finally, we present the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme and discuss some open issues in federated learning.
Adversarial training (i.e., training on adversarially perturbed input data) is a well-studied method for making neural networks robust to potential adversarial attacks during inference. However, the improved robustness does not come for free but rather is accompanied by a decrease in overall model accuracy and performance. Recent work has shown that, in practical robot learning applications, the effects of adversarial training do not pose a fair trade-off but inflict a net loss when measured in holistic robot performance. This work revisits the robustness-accuracy trade-off in robot learning by systematically analyzing if recent advances in robust training methods and theory in conjunction with adversarial robot learning can make adversarial training suitable for real-world robot applications. We evaluate a wide variety of robot learning tasks ranging from autonomous driving in a high-fidelity environment amenable to sim-to-real deployment, to mobile robot gesture recognition. Our results demonstrate that, while these techniques make incremental improvements on the trade-off on a relative scale, the negative side-effects caused by adversarial training still outweigh the improvements by an order of magnitude. We conclude that more substantial advances in robust learning methods are necessary before they can benefit robot learning tasks in practice.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known sample-inefficiency problem. This means that the algorithms are data-hungry and require millions of training samples to converge to an adequate policy. One way to combat this issue is to use action advising in a teacher-student framework, where a knowledgeable teacher provides action advice to help the student. This work considers how to better leverage uncertainties about when a student should ask for advice and if the student can model the teacher to ask for less advice. The student could decide to ask for advice when it is uncertain or when both it and its model of the teacher are uncertain. In addition to this investigation, this paper introduces a new method to compute uncertainty for a deep RL agent using a secondary neural network. Our empirical results show that using dual uncertainties to drive advice collection and reuse may improve learning performance across several Atari games.
Behaviors of the synthetic characters in current military simulations are limited since they are generally generated by rule-based and reactive computational models with minimal intelligence. Such computational models cannot adapt to reflect the experience of the characters, resulting in brittle intelligence for even the most effective behavior models devised via costly and labor-intensive processes. Observation-based behavior model adaptation that leverages machine learning and the experience of synthetic entities in combination with appropriate prior knowledge can address the issues in the existing computational behavior models to create a better training experience in military training simulations. In this paper, we introduce a framework that aims to create autonomous synthetic characters that can perform coherent sequences of believable behavior while being aware of human trainees and their needs within a training simulation. This framework brings together three mutually complementary components. The first component is a Unity-based simulation environment - Rapid Integration and Development Environment (RIDE) - supporting One World Terrain (OWT) models and capable of running and supporting machine learning experiments. The second is Shiva, a novel multi-agent reinforcement and imitation learning framework that can interface with a variety of simulation environments, and that can additionally utilize a variety of learning algorithms. The final component is the Sigma Cognitive Architecture that will augment the behavior models with symbolic and probabilistic reasoning capabilities. We have successfully created proof-of-concept behavior models leveraging this framework on realistic terrain as an essential step towards bringing machine learning into military simulations.
This paper surveys the field of transfer learning in the problem setting of Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL has been the key solution to sequential decision-making problems. Along with the fast advance of RL in various domains. including robotics and game-playing, transfer learning arises as an important technique to assist RL by leveraging and transferring external expertise to boost the learning process. In this survey, we review the central issues of transfer learning in the RL domain, providing a systematic categorization of its state-of-the-art techniques. We analyze their goals, methodologies, applications, and the RL frameworks under which these transfer learning techniques would be approachable. We discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other relevant topics from an RL perspective and also explore the potential challenges as well as future development directions for transfer learning in RL.