In recent years, reinforcement learning and its multi-agent analogue have achieved great success in solving various complex control problems. However, multi-agent reinforcement learning remains challenging both in its theoretical analysis and empirical design of algorithms, especially for large swarms of embodied robotic agents where a definitive toolchain remains part of active research. We use emerging state-of-the-art mean-field control techniques in order to convert many-agent swarm control into more classical single-agent control of distributions. This allows profiting from advances in single-agent reinforcement learning at the cost of assuming weak interaction between agents. As a result, the mean-field model is violated by the nature of real systems with embodied, physically colliding agents. Here, we combine collision avoidance and learning of mean-field control into a unified framework for tractably designing intelligent robotic swarm behavior. On the theoretical side, we provide novel approximation guarantees for both general mean-field control in continuous spaces and with collision avoidance. On the practical side, we show that our approach outperforms multi-agent reinforcement learning and allows for decentralized open-loop application while avoiding collisions, both in simulation and real UAV swarms. Overall, we propose a framework for the design of swarm behavior that is both mathematically well-founded and practically useful, enabling the solution of otherwise intractable swarm problems.
A Behavior Tree (BT) is a way to structure the switching between different tasks in an autonomous agent, such as a robot or a virtual entity in a computer game. BTs are a very efficient way of creating complex systems that are both modular and reactive. These properties are crucial in many applications, which has led to the spread of BT from computer game programming to many branches of AI and Robotics. In this book, we will first give an introduction to BTs, then we describe how BTs relate to, and in many cases generalize, earlier switching structures. These ideas are then used as a foundation for a set of efficient and easy to use design principles. Properties such as safety, robustness, and efficiency are important for an autonomous system, and we describe a set of tools for formally analyzing these using a state space description of BTs. With the new analysis tools, we can formalize the descriptions of how BTs generalize earlier approaches. We also show the use of BTs in automated planning and machine learning. Finally, we describe an extended set of tools to capture the behavior of Stochastic BTs, where the outcomes of actions are described by probabilities. These tools enable the computation of both success probabilities and time to completion.
In robotic manipulation, end-effector compliance is an essential precondition for performing contact-rich tasks, such as machining, assembly, and human-robot interaction. Most robotic arms are position-controlled stiff systems at a hardware level. Thus, adding compliance becomes essential. Compliance in those systems has been recently achieved using Forward dynamics compliance control (FDCC), which, owing to its virtual forward dynamics model, can be implemented on both position and velocity-controlled robots. This paper evaluates the choice of control interface (and hence the control domain), which, although considered trivial, is essential due to differences in their characteristics. In some cases, the choice is restricted to the available hardware interface. However, given the option to choose, the velocity-based control interface makes a better candidate for compliance control because of smoother compliant behaviour, reduced interaction forces, and work done. To prove these points, in this paper FDCC is evaluated on the UR10e six-DOF manipulator with velocity and position control modes. The evaluation is based on force-control benchmarking metrics using 3D-printed artefacts. Real experiments favour the choice of velocity control over position control.
Traditional control methods of robotic peg-in-hole assembly rely on complex contact state analysis. Reinforcement learning (RL) is gradually becoming a preferred method of controlling robotic peg-in-hole assembly tasks. However, the training process of RL is quite time-consuming because RL methods are always globally connected, which means all state components are assumed to be the input of policies for all action components, thus increasing action space and state space to be explored. In this paper, we first define continuous space serialized Shapley value (CS3) and construct a connection graph to clarify the correlativity of action components on state components. Then we propose a local connection reinforcement learning (LCRL) method based on the connection graph, which eliminates the influence of irrelevant state components on the selection of action components. The simulation and experiment results demonstrate that the control strategy obtained through LCRL method improves the stability and rapidity of the control process. LCRL method will enhance the data-efficiency and increase the final reward of the training process.
Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in recent years. One of the key challenges in manipulation is the exploration of the dynamics of the environment when there is continuous contact between the objects being manipulated. This paper proposes a model-based active exploration approach that enables efficient learning in sparse-reward robotic manipulation tasks. The proposed method estimates an information gain objective using an ensemble of probabilistic models and deploys model predictive control (MPC) to plan actions online that maximize the expected reward while also performing directed exploration. We evaluate our proposed algorithm in simulation and on a real robot, trained from scratch with our method, on a challenging ball pushing task on tilted tables, where the target ball position is not known to the agent a-priori. Our real-world robot experiment serves as a fundamental application of active exploration in model-based reinforcement learning of complex robotic manipulation tasks.
The beam alignment (BA) problem consists in accurately aligning the transmitter and receiver beams to establish a reliable communication link in wireless communication systems. Existing BA methods search the entire beam space to identify the optimal transmit-receive beam pair. This incurs a significant latency when the number of antennas is large. In this work, we develop a bandit-based fast BA algorithm to reduce BA latency for millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. Our algorithm is named Two-Phase Heteroscedastic Track-and-Stop (2PHT\&S). We first formulate the BA problem as a pure exploration problem in multi-armed bandits in which the objective is to minimize the required number of time steps given a certain fixed confidence level. By taking advantage of the correlation structure among beams that the information from nearby beams is similar and the heteroscedastic property that the variance of the reward of an arm (beam) is related to its mean, the proposed algorithm groups all beams into several beam sets such that the optimal beam set is first selected and the optimal beam is identified in this set after that. Theoretical analysis and simulation results on synthetic and semi-practical channel data demonstrate the clear superiority of the proposed algorithm vis-\`a-vis other baseline competitors.
While there has been substantial success in applying actor-critic methods to continuous control, simpler critic-only methods such as Q-learning often remain intractable in the associated high-dimensional action spaces. However, most actor-critic methods come at the cost of added complexity: heuristics for stabilization, compute requirements as well as wider hyperparameter search spaces. We show that these issues can be largely alleviated via Q-learning by combining action discretization with value decomposition, framing single-agent control as cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). With bang-bang actions, performance of this critic-only approach matches state-of-the-art continuous actor-critic methods when learning from features or pixels. We extend classical bandit examples from cooperative MARL to provide intuition for how decoupled critics leverage state information to coordinate joint optimization, and demonstrate surprisingly strong performance across a wide variety of continuous control tasks.
Reinforcement learning has been demonstrated as a flexible and effective approach for learning a range of continuous control tasks, such as those used by robots to manipulate objects in their environment. But in robotics particularly, real-world rollouts are costly, and sample efficiency can be a major limiting factor when learning a new skill. In game environments, the use of world models has been shown to improve sample efficiency while still achieving good performance, especially when images or other rich observations are provided. In this project, we explore the use of a world model in a deformable robotic manipulation task, evaluating its effect on sample efficiency when learning to fold a cloth in simulation. We compare the use of RGB image observation with a feature space leveraging built-in structure (keypoints representing the cloth configuration), a common approach in robot skill learning, and compare the impact on task performance and learning efficiency with and without the world model. Our experiments showed that the usage of keypoints increased the performance of the best model on the task by 50%, and in general, the use of a learned or constructed reduced feature space improved task performance and sample efficiency. The use of a state transition predictor(MDN-RNN) in our world models did not have a notable effect on task performance.
Designing reinforcement learning (RL) agents is typically a difficult process that requires numerous design iterations. Learning can fail for a multitude of reasons, and standard RL methods provide too few tools to provide insight into the exact cause. In this paper, we show how to integrate value decomposition into a broad class of actor-critic algorithms and use it to assist in the iterative agent-design process. Value decomposition separates a reward function into distinct components and learns value estimates for each. These value estimates provide insight into an agent's learning and decision-making process and enable new training methods to mitigate common problems. As a demonstration, we introduce SAC-D, a variant of soft actor-critic (SAC) adapted for value decomposition. SAC-D maintains similar performance to SAC, while learning a larger set of value predictions. We also introduce decomposition-based tools that exploit this information, including a new reward influence metric, which measures each reward component's effect on agent decision-making. Using these tools, we provide several demonstrations of decomposition's use in identifying and addressing problems in the design of both environments and agents. Value decomposition is broadly applicable and easy to incorporate into existing algorithms and workflows, making it a powerful tool in an RL practitioner's toolbox.
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.
In the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of deep learning to dominate the field of artificial intelligence. Advances in artificial neural networks alongside corresponding advances in hardware accelerators with large memory capacity, together with the availability of large datasets enabled researchers and practitioners alike to train and deploy sophisticated neural network models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on tasks across several fields spanning computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning. However, as these neural networks become bigger, more complex, and more widely used, fundamental problems with current deep learning models become more apparent. State-of-the-art deep learning models are known to suffer from issues that range from poor robustness, inability to adapt to novel task settings, to requiring rigid and inflexible configuration assumptions. Ideas from collective intelligence, in particular concepts from complex systems such as self-organization, emergent behavior, swarm optimization, and cellular systems tend to produce solutions that are robust, adaptable, and have less rigid assumptions about the environment configuration. It is therefore natural to see these ideas incorporated into newer deep learning methods. In this review, we will provide a historical context of neural network research's involvement with complex systems, and highlight several active areas in modern deep learning research that incorporate the principles of collective intelligence to advance its current capabilities. To facilitate a bi-directional flow of ideas, we also discuss work that utilize modern deep learning models to help advance complex systems research. We hope this review can serve as a bridge between complex systems and deep learning communities to facilitate the cross pollination of ideas and foster new collaborations across disciplines.