Optimal motion planning involves obstacles avoidance where path planning is the key to success in optimal motion planning. Due to the computational demands, most of the path planning algorithms can not be employed for real-time based applications. Model-based reinforcement learning approaches for path planning have received certain success in the recent past. Yet, most of such approaches do not have deterministic output due to the randomness. We analyzed several types of reinforcement learning-based approaches for path planning. One of them is a deterministic tree-based approach and other two approaches are based on Q-learning and approximate policy gradient, respectively. We tested preceding approaches on two different simulators, each of which consists of a set of random obstacles that can be changed or moved dynamically. After analysing the result and computation time, we concluded that the deterministic tree search approach provides highly stable result. However, the computational time is considerably higher than the other two approaches. Finally, the comparative results are provided in terms of accuracy and computational time as evidence.
In this paper we introduce a new approach to discrete-time semi-Markov decision processes based on the sojourn time process. Different characterizations of discrete-time semi-Markov processes are exploited and decision processes are constructed by their means. With this new approach, the agent is allowed to consider different actions depending also on the sojourn time of the process in the current state. A numerical method based on $Q$-learning algorithms for finite horizon reinforcement learning and stochastic recursive relations is investigated. Finally, we consider two toy examples: one in which the reward depends on the sojourn-time, according to the gambler's fallacy; the other in which the environment is semi-Markov even if the reward function does not depend on the sojourn time. These are used to carry on some numerical evaluations on the previously presented $Q$-learning algorithm and on a different naive method based on deep reinforcement learning.
Recently, model-based agents have achieved better performance compared with model-free ones using the same computational budget and training time in single-agent environments. However, due to the complexity of multi-agent systems, it is very difficult to learn the model of the environment. When model-based methods are applied to multi-agent tasks, the significant compounding error may hinder the learning process. In this paper, we propose an implicit model-based multi-agent reinforcement learning method based on value decomposition methods. Under this method, agents can interact with the learned virtual environment and evaluate the current state value according to imagined future states, which makes agents have foresight. Our method can be applied to any multi-agent value decomposition method. The experimental results show that our method improves the sample efficiency in partially observable Markov decision process domains.
Recent work has demonstrated that motion planners' performance can be significantly improved by retrieving past experiences from a database. Typically, the experience database is queried for past similar problems using a similarity function defined over the motion planning problems. However, to date, most works rely on simple hand-crafted similarity functions and fail to generalize outside their corresponding training dataset. To address this limitation, we propose (FIRE), a framework that extracts local representations of planning problems and learns a similarity function over them. To generate the training data we introduce a novel self-supervised method that identifies similar and dissimilar pairs of local primitives from past solution paths. With these pairs, a Siamese network is trained with the contrastive loss and the similarity function is realized in the network's latent space. We evaluate FIRE on an 8-DOF manipulator in five categories of motion planning problems with sensed environments. Our experiments show that FIRE retrieves relevant experiences which can informatively guide sampling-based planners even in problems outside its training distribution, outperforming other baselines.
Agents that interact with other agents often do not know a priori what the other agents' strategies are, but have to maximise their own online return while interacting with and learning about others. The optimal adaptive behaviour under uncertainty over the other agents' strategies w.r.t. some prior can in principle be computed using the Interactive Bayesian Reinforcement Learning framework. Unfortunately, doing so is intractable in most settings, and existing approximation methods are restricted to small tasks. To overcome this, we propose to meta-learn approximate belief inference and Bayes-optimal behaviour for a given prior. To model beliefs over other agents, we combine sequential and hierarchical Variational Auto-Encoders, and meta-train this inference model alongside the policy. We show empirically that our approach outperforms existing methods that use a model-free approach, sample from the approximate posterior, maintain memory-free models of others, or do not fully utilise the known structure of the environment.
Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of performant policies that are diverse with respect to quantified behavior. Recent work shows that differentiable quality diversity (DQD) algorithms greatly accelerate QD optimization when exact gradients are available. However, agent policies typically assume that the environment is not differentiable. To apply DQD algorithms to training agent policies, we must approximate gradients for performance and behavior. We propose two variants of the current state-of-the-art DQD algorithm that compute gradients via approximation methods common in reinforcement learning (RL). We evaluate our approach on four simulated locomotion tasks. One variant achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art in combining QD and RL, while the other performs comparably in two locomotion tasks. These results provide insight into the limitations of current DQD algorithms in domains where gradients must be approximated. Source code is available at //github.com/icaros-usc/dqd-rl
5G applications have become increasingly popular in recent years as the spread of fifth-generation (5G) network deployment has grown. For vehicular networks, mmWave band signals have been well studied and used for communication and sensing. In this work, we propose a new dynamic ray tracing algorithm that exploits spatial and temporal coherence. We evaluate the performance by comparing the results on typical vehicular communication scenarios with GEMV^2, which uses a combination of deterministic and stochastic models, and WinProp, which utilizes the deterministic model for simulations with given environment information. We also compare the performance of our algorithm on complex, urban models and observe a reduction in computation time by 36% compared to GEMV^2 and by 30% compared to WinProp, while maintaining similar prediction accuracy.
Recently, deep multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) has become a highly active research area as many real-world problems can be inherently viewed as multiagent systems. A particularly interesting and widely applicable class of problems is the partially observable cooperative multiagent setting, in which a team of agents learns to coordinate their behaviors conditioning on their private observations and commonly shared global reward signals. One natural solution is to resort to the centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm. During centralized training, one key challenge is the multiagent credit assignment: how to allocate the global rewards for individual agent policies for better coordination towards maximizing system-level's benefits. In this paper, we propose a new method called Q-value Path Decomposition (QPD) to decompose the system's global Q-values into individual agents' Q-values. Unlike previous works which restrict the representation relation of the individual Q-values and the global one, we leverage the integrated gradient attribution technique into deep MARL to directly decompose global Q-values along trajectory paths to assign credits for agents. We evaluate QPD on the challenging StarCraft II micromanagement tasks and show that QPD achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous multiagent scenarios compared with existing cooperative MARL algorithms.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
Policy gradient methods are often applied to reinforcement learning in continuous multiagent games. These methods perform local search in the joint-action space, and as we show, they are susceptable to a game-theoretic pathology known as relative overgeneralization. To resolve this issue, we propose Multiagent Soft Q-learning, which can be seen as the analogue of applying Q-learning to continuous controls. We compare our method to MADDPG, a state-of-the-art approach, and show that our method achieves better coordination in multiagent cooperative tasks, converging to better local optima in the joint action space.
We study the problem of learning to reason in large scale knowledge graphs (KGs). More specifically, we describe a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning multi-hop relational paths: we use a policy-based agent with continuous states based on knowledge graph embeddings, which reasons in a KG vector space by sampling the most promising relation to extend its path. In contrast to prior work, our approach includes a reward function that takes the accuracy, diversity, and efficiency into consideration. Experimentally, we show that our proposed method outperforms a path-ranking based algorithm and knowledge graph embedding methods on Freebase and Never-Ending Language Learning datasets.