In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-stage optimization method for planning complex missions for heterogeneous multi-robot teams. This class of problems involves tasks that can be executed in different ways and are associated with cross-schedule dependencies that constrain the schedules of the different robots in the system. The proposed approach involves a multi-objective heuristic search of the mission, represented as a hierarchical tree that defines the mission goal. This procedure outputs several favorable ways to fulfill the mission, which directly feed into the next stage of the method. We propose a distributed metaheuristic based on evolutionary computation to allocate tasks and generate schedules for the set of chosen decompositions. The method is evaluated in a simulation setup of an automated greenhouse use case, where we demonstrate the method's ability to adapt the planning strategy depending on the available robots and the given optimization criteria.
Data is of high quality if it is fit for its intended use. The quality of data is influenced by the underlying data model and its quality. One major quality problem is the heterogeneity of data as quality aspects such as understandability and interoperability are impaired. This heterogeneity may be caused by quality problems in the data model. Data heterogeneity can occur in particular when the information given is not structured enough and just captured in data values, often due to missing or non-suitable structure in the underlying data model. We propose a bottom-up approach to detecting quality problems in data models that manifest in heterogeneous data values. It supports an explorative analysis of the existing data and can be configured by domain experts according to their domain knowledge. All values of a selected data field are clustered by syntactic similarity. Thereby an overview of the data values' diversity in syntax is provided. It shall help domain experts to understand how the data model is used in practice and to derive potential quality problems of the data model. We outline a proof-of-concept implementation and evaluate our approach using cultural heritage data.
Estimating the difference between quantum data is crucial in quantum computing. However, as typical characterizations of quantum data similarity, the trace distance and quantum fidelity are believed to be exponentially-hard to evaluate in general. In this work, we introduce hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for these two distance measures on near-term quantum devices where no assumption of input state is required. First, we introduce the Variational Trace Distance Estimation (VTDE) algorithm. We in particular provide the technique to extract the desired spectrum information of any Hermitian matrix by local measurement. A novel variational algorithm for trace distance estimation is then derived from this technique, with the assistance of a single ancillary qubit. Notably, VTDE could avoid the barren plateau issue with logarithmic depth circuits due to a local cost function. Second, we introduce the Variational Fidelity Estimation (VFE) algorithm. We combine Uhlmann's theorem and the freedom in purification to translate the estimation task into an optimization problem over a unitary on an ancillary system with fixed purified inputs. We then provide a purification subroutine to complete the translation. Both algorithms are verified by numerical simulations and experimental implementations, exhibiting high accuracy for randomly generated mixed states.
A future is a programming construct designed for concurrent and asynchronous evaluation of code, making it particularly useful for parallel processing. The future package implements the Future API for programming with futures in R. This minimal API provides sufficient constructs for implementing parallel versions of well-established, high-level map-reduce APIs. The future ecosystem supports exception handling, output and condition relaying, parallel random number generation, and automatic identification of globals lowering the threshold to parallelize code. The Future API bridges parallel frontends with parallel backends following the philosophy that end-users are the ones who choose the parallel backend while the developer focuses on what to parallelize. A variety of backends exist and third-party contributions meeting the specifications, which ensure that the same code works on all backends, are automatically supported. The future framework solves several problems not addressed by other parallel frameworks in R.
Many important real-world problems have action spaces that are high-dimensional, continuous or both, making full enumeration of all possible actions infeasible. Instead, only small subsets of actions can be sampled for the purpose of policy evaluation and improvement. In this paper, we propose a general framework to reason in a principled way about policy evaluation and improvement over such sampled action subsets. This sample-based policy iteration framework can in principle be applied to any reinforcement learning algorithm based upon policy iteration. Concretely, we propose Sampled MuZero, an extension of the MuZero algorithm that is able to learn in domains with arbitrarily complex action spaces by planning over sampled actions. We demonstrate this approach on the classical board game of Go and on two continuous control benchmark domains: DeepMind Control Suite and Real-World RL Suite.
We study the offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) problem, a paradigm which enables reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to quickly adapt to unseen tasks without any interactions with the environments, making RL truly practical in many real-world applications. This problem is still not fully understood, for which two major challenges need to be addressed. First, offline RL usually suffers from bootstrapping errors of out-of-distribution state-actions which leads to divergence of value functions. Second, meta-RL requires efficient and robust task inference learned jointly with control policy. In this work, we enforce behavior regularization on learned policy as a general approach to offline RL, combined with a deterministic context encoder for efficient task inference. We propose a novel negative-power distance metric on bounded context embedding space, whose gradients propagation is detached from the Bellman backup. We provide analysis and insight showing that some simple design choices can yield substantial improvements over recent approaches involving meta-RL and distance metric learning. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first model-free and end-to-end OMRL algorithm, which is computationally efficient and demonstrated to outperform prior algorithms on several meta-RL benchmarks.
Categorizing documents into a given label hierarchy is intuitively appealing due to the ubiquity of hierarchical topic structures in massive text corpora. Although related studies have achieved satisfying performance in fully supervised hierarchical document classification, they usually require massive human-annotated training data and only utilize text information. However, in many domains, (1) annotations are quite expensive where very few training samples can be acquired; (2) documents are accompanied by metadata information. Hence, this paper studies how to integrate the label hierarchy, metadata, and text signals for document categorization under weak supervision. We develop HiMeCat, an embedding-based generative framework for our task. Specifically, we propose a novel joint representation learning module that allows simultaneous modeling of category dependencies, metadata information and textual semantics, and we introduce a data augmentation module that hierarchically synthesizes training documents to complement the original, small-scale training set. Our experiments demonstrate a consistent improvement of HiMeCat over competitive baselines and validate the contribution of our representation learning and data augmentation modules.
The demand for artificial intelligence has grown significantly over the last decade and this growth has been fueled by advances in machine learning techniques and the ability to leverage hardware acceleration. However, in order to increase the quality of predictions and render machine learning solutions feasible for more complex applications, a substantial amount of training data is required. Although small machine learning models can be trained with modest amounts of data, the input for training larger models such as neural networks grows exponentially with the number of parameters. Since the demand for processing training data has outpaced the increase in computation power of computing machinery, there is a need for distributing the machine learning workload across multiple machines, and turning the centralized into a distributed system. These distributed systems present new challenges, first and foremost the efficient parallelization of the training process and the creation of a coherent model. This article provides an extensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field by outlining the challenges and opportunities of distributed machine learning over conventional (centralized) machine learning, discussing the techniques used for distributed machine learning, and providing an overview of the systems that are available.
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 6 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.
Most policy search algorithms require thousands of training episodes to find an effective policy, which is often infeasible with a physical robot. This survey article focuses on the extreme other end of the spectrum: how can a robot adapt with only a handful of trials (a dozen) and a few minutes? By analogy with the word "big-data", we refer to this challenge as "micro-data reinforcement learning". We show that a first strategy is to leverage prior knowledge on the policy structure (e.g., dynamic movement primitives), on the policy parameters (e.g., demonstrations), or on the dynamics (e.g., simulators). A second strategy is to create data-driven surrogate models of the expected reward (e.g., Bayesian optimization) or the dynamical model (e.g., model-based policy search), so that the policy optimizer queries the model instead of the real system. Overall, all successful micro-data algorithms combine these two strategies by varying the kind of model and prior knowledge. The current scientific challenges essentially revolve around scaling up to complex robots (e.g., humanoids), designing generic priors, and optimizing the computing time.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.