We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) setting, in which the agent has to act in unknown environment driven by a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with sparse or even reward free signals. In this situation, exploration becomes the main challenge. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The first type is visitation entropy maximization that was previously considered by Hazan et al. (2019) in the discounted setting. For this type of exploration, we propose an algorithm based on a game theoretic representation that has $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(H^3 S^2 A / \varepsilon^2)$ sample complexity thus improving the $\varepsilon$-dependence of Hazan et al. (2019), where $S$ is a number of states, $A$ is a number of actions, $H$ is an episode length, and $\varepsilon$ is a desired accuracy. The second type of entropy we study is the trajectory entropy. This objective function is closely related to the entropy-regularized MDPs, and we propose a simple modification of the UCBVI algorithm that has a sample complexity of order $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\varepsilon)$ ignoring dependence in $S, A, H$. Interestingly enough, it is the first theoretical result in RL literature establishing that the exploration problem for the regularized MDPs can be statistically strictly easier (in terms of sample complexity) than for the ordinary MDPs.
Let a polytope $P$ be defined by a system $A x \leq b$. We consider the problem of counting the number of integer points inside $P$, assuming that $P$ is $\Delta$-modular, where the polytope $P$ is called $\Delta$-modular if all the rank sub-determinants of $A$ are bounded by $\Delta$ in the absolute value. We present a new FPT-algorithm, parameterized by $\Delta$ and by the maximal number of vertices in $P$, where the maximum is taken by all r.h.s. vectors $b$. We show that our algorithm is more efficient for $\Delta$-modular problems than the approach of A. Barvinok et al. To this end, we do not directly compute the short rational generating function for $P \cap Z^n$, which is commonly used for the considered problem. Instead, we use the dynamic programming principle to compute its particular representation in the form of exponential series that depends on a single variable. We completely do not rely to the Barvinok's unimodular sign decomposition technique. Using our new complexity bound, we consider different special cases that may be of independent interest. For example, we give FPT-algorithms for counting the integer points number in $\Delta$-modular simplices and similar polytopes that have $n + O(1)$ facets. As a special case, for any fixed $m$, we give an FPT-algorithm to count solutions of the unbounded $m$-dimensional $\Delta$-modular subset-sum problem.
We consider a joint sampling and compression system for timely status updates. Samples are taken, quantized and encoded into binary sequences, which are sent to the destination. We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design sampler, quantizer and encoder, minimizing the age of information (AoI) on the basis of satisfying a mean-squared error (MSE) distortion constraint of the samples. We prove that the zero-wait sampling, the uniform quantization, and the real-valued AoI-optimal coding policies together provide an asymptotically optimal solution to this problem, i.e., as the average distortion approaches zero, the combination achieves the minimum AoI asymptotically. Furthermore, we prove that the AoI of this solution is asymptotically linear with respect to the log MSE distortion with a slope of $-\frac{3}{4}$. We also show that the real-valued Shannon coding policy suffices to achieve the optimal performance asymptotically. Numerical simulations corroborate the analysis.
When deploying artificial agents in real-world environments where they interact with humans, it is crucial that their behavior is aligned with the values, social norms or other requirements of that environment. However, many environments have implicit constraints that are difficult to specify and transfer to a learning agent. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that utilizes the principle of maximum causal entropy to learn constraints and an optimal policy that adheres to these constraints, using demonstrations of agents that abide by the constraints. We prove convergence in a tabular setting and provide an approximation which scales to complex environments. We evaluate the effectiveness of the learned policy by assessing the reward received and the number of constraint violations, and we evaluate the learned cost function based on its transferability to other agents. Our method has been shown to outperform state-of-the-art approaches across a variety of tasks and environments, and it is able to handle problems with stochastic dynamics and a continuous state-action space.
We consider \emph{Gibbs distributions}, which are families of probability distributions over a discrete space $\Omega$ with probability mass function of the form $\mu^\Omega_\beta(\omega) \propto e^{\beta H(\omega)}$ for $\beta$ in an interval $[\beta_{\min}, \beta_{\max}]$ and $H( \omega ) \in \{0 \} \cup [1, n]$. The \emph{partition function} is the normalization factor $Z(\beta)=\sum_{\omega \in\Omega}e^{\beta H(\omega)}$. Two important parameters of these distributions are the log partition ratio $q = \log \tfrac{Z(\beta_{\max})}{Z(\beta_{\min})}$ and the counts $c_x = |H^{-1}(x)|$. These are correlated with system parameters in a number of physical applications and sampling algorithms. Our first main result is to estimate the counts $c_x$ using roughly $\tilde O( \frac{q}{\varepsilon^2})$ samples for general Gibbs distributions and $\tilde O( \frac{n^2}{\varepsilon^2} )$ samples for integer-valued distributions (ignoring some second-order terms and parameters), and we show this is optimal up to logarithmic factors. We illustrate with improved algorithms for counting connected subgraphs, independent sets, and perfect matchings. As a key subroutine, we also develop algorithms to compute the partition function $Z$ using $\tilde O(\frac{q}{\varepsilon^2})$ samples for general Gibbs distributions and using $\tilde O(\frac{n^2}{\varepsilon^2})$ samples for integer-valued distributions.
A minimum chain cover (MCC) of a $k$-width directed acyclic graph (DAG) $G = (V, E)$ is a set of $k$ chains (paths in the transitive closure) of $G$ such that every vertex appears in at least one chain in the cover. The state-of-the-art solutions for MCC run in time $\tilde{O}(k(|V|+|E|))$ [M\"akinen et at., TALG], $O(T_{MF}(|E|) + k|V|)$, $O(k^2|V| + |E|)$ [C\'aceres et al., SODA 2022], $\tilde{O}(|V|^{3/2} + |E|)$ [Kogan and Parter, ICALP 2022] and $\tilde{O}(T_{MCF}(|E|) + \sqrt{k}|V|)$ [Kogan and Parter, SODA 2023], where $T_{MF}(|E|)$ and $T_{MCF}(|E|)$ are the running times for solving maximum flow (MF) and minimum-cost flow (MCF), respectively. In this work we present an algorithm running in time $O(T_{MF}(|E|) + (|V|+|E|)\log{k})$. By considering the recent result for solving MF [Chen et al., FOCS 2022] our algorithm is the first running in almost linear time. Moreover, our techniques are deterministic and derive a deterministic near-linear time algorithm for MCC if the same is provided for MF. At the core of our solution we use a modified version of the mergeable dictionaries [Farach and Thorup, Algorithmica], [Iacono and \"Ozkan, ICALP 2010] data structure boosted with the SIZE-SPLIT operation and answering queries in amortized logarithmic time, which can be of independent interest.
We consider the coordinated escort problem, where a decentralised team of supporting robots implicitly assist the mission of higher-value principal robots. The defining challenge is how to evaluate the effect of supporting robots' actions on the principal robots' mission. To capture this effect, we define two novel auxiliary reward functions for supporting robots called satisfaction improvement and satisfaction entropy, which computes the improvement in probability of mission success, or the uncertainty thereof. Given these reward functions, we coordinate the entire team of principal and supporting robots using decentralised cross entropy method (Dec-CEM), a new extension of CEM to multi-agent systems based on the product distribution approximation. In a simulated object avoidance scenario, our planning framework demonstrates up to two-fold improvement in task satisfaction against conventional decoupled information gathering.The significance of our results is to introduce a new family of algorithmic problems that will enable important new practical applications of heterogeneous multi-robot systems.
Actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have recently achieved prominent success in tackling various challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems, particularly complex control tasks with high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. Nevertheless, existing research showed that actor-critic DRL algorithms often failed to explore their learning environments effectively, resulting in limited learning stability and performance. To address this limitation, several ensemble DRL algorithms have been proposed lately to boost exploration and stabilize the learning process. However, most of existing ensemble algorithms do not explicitly train all base learners towards jointly optimizing the performance of the ensemble. In this paper, we propose a new technique to train an ensemble of base learners based on an innovative multi-step integration method. This training technique enables us to develop a new hierarchical learning algorithm for ensemble DRL that effectively promotes inter-learner collaboration through stable inter-learner parameter sharing. The design of our new algorithm is verified theoretically. The algorithm is also shown empirically to outperform several state-of-the-art DRL algorithms on multiple benchmark RL problems.
Deep learning-based approaches have produced models with good insect classification accuracy; Most of these models are conducive for application in controlled environmental conditions. One of the primary emphasis of researchers is to implement identification and classification models in the real agriculture fields, which is challenging because input images that are wildly out of the distribution (e.g., images like vehicles, animals, humans, or a blurred image of an insect or insect class that is not yet trained on) can produce an incorrect insect classification. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection algorithms provide an exciting avenue to overcome these challenge as it ensures that a model abstains from making incorrect classification prediction of non-insect and/or untrained insect class images. We generate and evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art OOD algorithms on insect detection classifiers. These algorithms represent a diversity of methods for addressing an OOD problem. Specifically, we focus on extrusive algorithms, i.e., algorithms that wrap around a well-trained classifier without the need for additional co-training. We compared three OOD detection algorithms: (i) Maximum Softmax Probability, which uses the softmax value as a confidence score, (ii) Mahalanobis distance-based algorithm, which uses a generative classification approach; and (iii) Energy-Based algorithm that maps the input data to a scalar value, called energy. We performed an extensive series of evaluations of these OOD algorithms across three performance axes: (a) \textit{Base model accuracy}: How does the accuracy of the classifier impact OOD performance? (b) How does the \textit{level of dissimilarity to the domain} impact OOD performance? and (c) \textit{Data imbalance}: How sensitive is OOD performance to the imbalance in per-class sample size?
A mainstream type of current self-supervised learning methods pursues a general-purpose representation that can be well transferred to downstream tasks, typically by optimizing on a given pretext task such as instance discrimination. In this work, we argue that existing pretext tasks inevitably introduce biases into the learned representation, which in turn leads to biased transfer performance on various downstream tasks. To cope with this issue, we propose Maximum Entropy Coding (MEC), a more principled objective that explicitly optimizes on the structure of the representation, so that the learned representation is less biased and thus generalizes better to unseen downstream tasks. Inspired by the principle of maximum entropy in information theory, we hypothesize that a generalizable representation should be the one that admits the maximum entropy among all plausible representations. To make the objective end-to-end trainable, we propose to leverage the minimal coding length in lossy data coding as a computationally tractable surrogate for the entropy, and further derive a scalable reformulation of the objective that allows fast computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MEC learns a more generalizable representation than previous methods based on specific pretext tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently on various downstream tasks, including not only ImageNet linear probe, but also semi-supervised classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and object tracking. Interestingly, we show that existing batch-wise and feature-wise self-supervised objectives could be seen equivalent to low-order approximations of MEC. Code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/xinliu20/MEC.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.