Road maintenance planning is an integral part of road asset management. One of the main challenges in Maintenance and Rehabilitation (M&R) practices is to determine maintenance type and timing. This research proposes a framework using Reinforcement Learning (RL) based on the Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) database to determine the type and timing of M&R practices. A predictive DNN model is first developed in the proposed algorithm, which serves as the Environment for the RL algorithm. For the Policy estimation of the RL model, both DQN and PPO models are developed. However, PPO has been selected in the end due to better convergence and higher sample efficiency. Indicators used in this study are International Roughness Index (IRI) and Rutting Depth (RD). Initially, we considered Cracking Metric (CM) as the third indicator, but it was then excluded due to the much fewer data compared to other indicators, which resulted in lower accuracy of the results. Furthermore, in cost-effectiveness calculation (reward), we considered both the economic and environmental impacts of M&R treatments. Costs and environmental impacts have been evaluated with paLATE 2.0 software. Our method is tested on a hypothetical case study of a six-lane highway with 23 kilometers length located in Texas, which has a warm and wet climate. The results propose a 20-year M&R plan in which road condition remains in an excellent condition range. Because the early state of the road is at a good level of service, there is no need for heavy maintenance practices in the first years. Later, after heavy M&R actions, there are several 1-2 years of no need for treatments. All of these show that the proposed plan has a logical result. Decision-makers and transportation agencies can use this scheme to conduct better maintenance practices that can prevent budget waste and, at the same time, minimize the environmental impacts.
The deep reinforcement learning-based energy management strategies (EMS) have become a promising solution for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). When driving cycles are changed, the neural network will be retrained, which is a time-consuming and laborious task. A more efficient way of choosing EMS is to combine deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with transfer learning, which can transfer knowledge of one domain to the other new domain, making the network of the new domain reach convergence values quickly. Different exploration methods of DRL, including adding action space noise and parameter space noise, are compared against each other in the transfer learning process in this work. Results indicate that the network added parameter space noise is more stable and faster convergent than the others. In conclusion, the best exploration method for transferable EMS is to add noise in the parameter space, while the combination of action space noise and parameter space noise generally performs poorly. Our code is available at //github.com/BIT-XJY/RL-based-Transferable-EMS.git.
We study the joint active/passive beamforming and channel blocklength (CBL) allocation in a non-ideal reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) system. The considered scenario is a finite blocklength (FBL) regime and the problem is solved by leveraging a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm named twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3). First, assuming an industrial automation system with multiple actuators, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and achievable rate in the FBL regime are identified for each actuator in terms of the phase shift configuration matrix at the RIS. Next, the joint active/passive beamforming and CBL optimization problem is formulated where the objective is to maximize the total achievable FBL rate in all actuators, subject to non-linear amplitude response at the RIS elements, BS transmit power budget, and total available CBL. Since the amplitude response equality constraint is highly non-convex and non-linear, we resort to employing an actor-critic policy gradient DRL algorithm based on TD3. The considered method relies on interacting RIS with the industrial automation environment by taking actions which are the phase shifts at the RIS elements, CBL variables, and BS beamforming to maximize the expected observed reward, i.e., the total FBL rate. We assess the performance loss of the system when the RIS is non-ideal, i.e., with non-linear amplitude response, and compare it with ideal RIS without impairments. The numerical results show that optimizing the RIS phase shifts, BS beamforming, and CBL variables via the proposed TD3 method is highly beneficial to improving the network total FBL rate as the proposed method with deterministic policy outperforms conventional methods.
We present a data-efficient framework for solving sequential decision-making problems which exploits the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and latent variable generative models. The framework, called GenRL, trains deep policies by introducing an action latent variable such that the feed-forward policy search can be divided into two parts: (i) training a sub-policy that outputs a distribution over the action latent variable given a state of the system, and (ii) unsupervised training of a generative model that outputs a sequence of motor actions conditioned on the latent action variable. GenRL enables safe exploration and alleviates the data-inefficiency problem as it exploits prior knowledge about valid sequences of motor actions. Moreover, we provide a set of measures for evaluation of generative models such that we are able to predict the performance of the RL policy training prior to the actual training on a physical robot. We experimentally determine the characteristics of generative models that have most influence on the performance of the final policy training on two robotics tasks: shooting a hockey puck and throwing a basketball. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that GenRL is the only method which can safely and efficiently solve the robotics tasks compared to two state-of-the-art RL methods.
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.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
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.
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.
Deep learning constitutes a recent, modern technique for image processing and data analysis, with promising results and large potential. As deep learning has been successfully applied in various domains, it has recently entered also the domain of agriculture. In this paper, we perform a survey of 40 research efforts that employ deep learning techniques, applied to various agricultural and food production challenges. We examine the particular agricultural problems under study, the specific models and frameworks employed, the sources, nature and pre-processing of data used, and the overall performance achieved according to the metrics used at each work under study. Moreover, we study comparisons of deep learning with other existing popular techniques, in respect to differences in classification or regression performance. Our findings indicate that deep learning provides high accuracy, outperforming existing commonly used image processing techniques.
We present MILABOT: a deep reinforcement learning chatbot developed by the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition. MILABOT is capable of conversing with humans on popular small talk topics through both speech and text. The system consists of an ensemble of natural language generation and retrieval models, including neural network and template-based models. By applying reinforcement learning to crowdsourced data and real-world user interactions, the system has been trained to select an appropriate response from the models in its ensemble. The system has been evaluated through A/B testing with real-world users, where it performed significantly better than other systems. The results highlight the potential of coupling ensemble systems with deep reinforcement learning as a fruitful path for developing real-world, open-domain conversational agents.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.