Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) techniques have recently yielded promising results for real-world autonomous racing using high-dimensional observations. MBRL agents, such as Dreamer, solve long-horizon tasks by building a world model and planning actions by latent imagination. This approach involves explicitly learning a model of the system dynamics and using it to learn the optimal policy for continuous control over multiple timesteps. As a result, MBRL agents may converge to sub-optimal policies if the world model is inaccurate. To improve state estimation for autonomous racing, this paper proposes a self-supervised sensor fusion technique that combines egocentric LiDAR and RGB camera observations collected from the F1TENTH Gym. The zero-shot performance of MBRL agents is empirically evaluated on unseen tracks and against a dynamic obstacle. This paper illustrates that multimodal perception improves robustness of the world model without requiring additional training data. The resulting multimodal Dreamer agent safely avoided collisions and won the most races compared to other tested baselines in zero-shot head-to-head autonomous racing.
Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by learning the inherent structure of action-wise similar MDP to appropriately balance the performance degradation versus sample/computational complexity. In particular, we partition the action spaces into multiple groups based on the similarity in transition distribution and reward function, and build a linear decomposition model to capture the difference between the intra-group transition kernel and the intra-group rewards. Both our theoretical analysis and experiments reveal a \emph{surprising and counter-intuitive result}: while a more refined grouping strategy can reduce the approximation error caused by treating actions in the same group as identical, it also leads to increased estimation error when the size of samples or the computation resources is limited. This finding highlights the grouping strategy as a new degree of freedom that can be optimized to minimize the overall performance loss. To address this issue, we formulate a general optimization problem for determining the optimal grouping strategy, which strikes a balance between performance loss and sample/computational complexity. We further propose a computationally efficient method for selecting a nearly-optimal grouping strategy, which maintains its computational complexity independent of the size of the action space.
We propose DeepIPC, an end-to-end autonomous driving model that handles both perception and control tasks in driving a vehicle. The model consists of two main parts, perception and controller modules. The perception module takes an RGBD image to perform semantic segmentation and bird's eye view (BEV) semantic mapping along with providing their encoded features. Meanwhile, the controller module processes these features with the measurement of GNSS locations and angular speed to estimate waypoints that come with latent features. Then, two different agents are used to translate waypoints and latent features into a set of navigational controls to drive the vehicle. The model is evaluated by predicting driving records and performing automated driving under various conditions in real environments. The experimental results show that DeepIPC achieves the best drivability and multi-task performance even with fewer parameters compared to the other models. Codes will be published at //github.com/oskarnatan/DeepIPC.
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a sample efficient technique to obtain control policies, yet unavoidable modeling errors often lead performance deterioration. The model in MBRL is often solely fitted to reconstruct dynamics, state observations in particular, while the impact of model error on the policy is not captured by the training objective. This leads to a mismatch between the intended goal of MBRL, enabling good policy and value learning, and the target of the loss function employed in practice, future state prediction. Naive intuition would suggest that value-aware model learning would fix this problem and, indeed, several solutions to this objective mismatch problem have been proposed based on theoretical analysis. However, they tend to be inferior in practice to commonly used maximum likelihood (MLE) based approaches. In this paper we propose the Value-gradient weighted Model Learning (VaGraM), a novel method for value-aware model learning which improves the performance of MBRL in challenging settings, such as small model capacity and the presence of distracting state dimensions. We analyze both MLE and value-aware approaches and demonstrate how they fail to account for exploration and the behavior of function approximation when learning value-aware models and highlight the additional goals that must be met to stabilize optimization in the deep learning setting. We verify our analysis by showing that our loss function is able to achieve high returns on the Mujoco benchmark suite while being more robust than maximum likelihood based approaches.
Over the last decade, the use of autonomous drone systems for surveying, search and rescue, or last-mile delivery has increased exponentially. With the rise of these applications comes the need for highly robust, safety-critical algorithms which can operate drones in complex and uncertain environments. Additionally, flying fast enables drones to cover more ground which in turn increases productivity and further strengthens their use case. One proxy for developing algorithms used in high-speed navigation is the task of autonomous drone racing, where researchers program drones to fly through a sequence of gates and avoid obstacles as quickly as possible using onboard sensors and limited computational power. Speeds and accelerations exceed over 80 kph and 4 g respectively, raising significant challenges across perception, planning, control, and state estimation. To achieve maximum performance, systems require real-time algorithms that are robust to motion blur, high dynamic range, model uncertainties, aerodynamic disturbances, and often unpredictable opponents. This survey covers the progression of autonomous drone racing across model-based and learning-based approaches. We provide an overview of the field, its evolution over the years, and conclude with the biggest challenges and open questions to be faced in the future.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
We introduce DeepNash, an autonomous agent capable of learning to play the imperfect information game Stratego from scratch, up to a human expert level. Stratego is one of the few iconic board games that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has not yet mastered. This popular game has an enormous game tree on the order of $10^{535}$ nodes, i.e., $10^{175}$ times larger than that of Go. It has the additional complexity of requiring decision-making under imperfect information, similar to Texas hold'em poker, which has a significantly smaller game tree (on the order of $10^{164}$ nodes). Decisions in Stratego are made over a large number of discrete actions with no obvious link between action and outcome. Episodes are long, with often hundreds of moves before a player wins, and situations in Stratego can not easily be broken down into manageably-sized sub-problems as in poker. For these reasons, Stratego has been a grand challenge for the field of AI for decades, and existing AI methods barely reach an amateur level of play. DeepNash uses a game-theoretic, model-free deep reinforcement learning method, without search, that learns to master Stratego via self-play. The Regularised Nash Dynamics (R-NaD) algorithm, a key component of DeepNash, converges to an approximate Nash equilibrium, instead of 'cycling' around it, by directly modifying the underlying multi-agent learning dynamics. DeepNash beats existing state-of-the-art AI methods in Stratego and achieved a yearly (2022) and all-time top-3 rank on the Gravon games platform, competing with human expert players.
The transformer architecture and variants presented remarkable success across many machine learning tasks in recent years. This success is intrinsically related to the capability of handling long sequences and the presence of context-dependent weights from the attention mechanism. We argue that these capabilities suit the central role of a Meta-Reinforcement Learning algorithm. Indeed, a meta-RL agent needs to infer the task from a sequence of trajectories. Furthermore, it requires a fast adaptation strategy to adapt its policy for a new task -- which can be achieved using the self-attention mechanism. In this work, we present TrMRL (Transformers for Meta-Reinforcement Learning), a meta-RL agent that mimics the memory reinstatement mechanism using the transformer architecture. It associates the recent past of working memories to build an episodic memory recursively through the transformer layers. We show that the self-attention computes a consensus representation that minimizes the Bayes Risk at each layer and provides meaningful features to compute the best actions. We conducted experiments in high-dimensional continuous control environments for locomotion and dexterous manipulation. Results show that TrMRL presents comparable or superior asymptotic performance, sample efficiency, and out-of-distribution generalization compared to the baselines in these environments.
The advent of artificial intelligence technology paved the way of many researches to be made within air combat sector. Academicians and many other researchers did a research on a prominent research direction called autonomous maneuver decision of UAV. Elaborative researches produced some outcomes, but decisions that include Reinforcement Learning(RL) came out to be more efficient. There have been many researches and experiments done to make an agent reach its target in an optimal way, most prominent are Genetic Algorithm(GA) , A star, RRT and other various optimization techniques have been used. But Reinforcement Learning is the well known one for its success. In DARPHA Alpha Dogfight Trials, reinforcement learning prevailed against a real veteran F16 human pilot who was trained by Boeing. This successor model was developed by Heron Systems. After this accomplishment, reinforcement learning bring tremendous attention on itself. In this research we aimed our UAV which has a dubin vehicle dynamic property to move to the target in two dimensional space in an optimal path using Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (TD3) and used in experience replay Hindsight Experience Replay(HER).We did tests on two different environments and used simulations.
The Q-learning algorithm is known to be affected by the maximization bias, i.e. the systematic overestimation of action values, an important issue that has recently received renewed attention. Double Q-learning has been proposed as an efficient algorithm to mitigate this bias. However, this comes at the price of an underestimation of action values, in addition to increased memory requirements and a slower convergence. In this paper, we introduce a new way to address the maximization bias in the form of a "self-correcting algorithm" for approximating the maximum of an expected value. Our method balances the overestimation of the single estimator used in conventional Q-learning and the underestimation of the double estimator used in Double Q-learning. Applying this strategy to Q-learning results in Self-correcting Q-learning. We show theoretically that this new algorithm enjoys the same convergence guarantees as Q-learning while being more accurate. Empirically, it performs better than Double Q-learning in domains with rewards of high variance, and it even attains faster convergence than Q-learning in domains with rewards of zero or low variance. These advantages transfer to a Deep Q Network implementation that we call Self-correcting DQN and which outperforms regular DQN and Double DQN on several tasks in the Atari 2600 domain.
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.