Trajectory length stands as a crucial hyperparameter within reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, significantly contributing to the sample inefficiency in robotics applications. Motivated by the pivotal role trajectory length plays in the training process, we introduce Ada-NAV, a novel adaptive trajectory length scheme designed to enhance the training sample efficiency of RL algorithms in robotic navigation tasks. Unlike traditional approaches that treat trajectory length as a fixed hyperparameter, we propose to dynamically adjust it based on the entropy of the underlying navigation policy. Interestingly, Ada-NAV can be applied to both existing on-policy and off-policy RL methods, which we demonstrate by empirically validating its efficacy on three popular RL methods: REINFORCE, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). We demonstrate through simulated and real-world robotic experiments that Ada-NAV outperforms conventional methods that employ constant or randomly sampled trajectory lengths. Specifically, for a fixed sample budget, Ada-NAV achieves an 18\% increase in navigation success rate, a 20-38\% reduction in navigation path length, and a 9.32\% decrease in elevation costs. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of Ada-NAV by integrating it with the Clearpath Husky robot, illustrating its applicability in complex outdoor environments.
Machine learning (ML) techniques have been applied to high-level synthesis (HLS) flows for quality-of-result (QoR) prediction and design space exploration (DSE). Nevertheless, the scarcity of accessible high-quality HLS datasets and the complexity of building such datasets present challenges. Existing datasets have limitations in terms of benchmark coverage, design space enumeration, vendor extensibility, or lack of reproducible and extensible software for dataset construction. Many works also lack user-friendly ways to add more designs, limiting wider adoption of such datasets. In response to these challenges, we introduce HLSFactory, a comprehensive framework designed to facilitate the curation and generation of high-quality HLS design datasets. HLSFactory has three main stages: 1) a design space expansion stage to elaborate single HLS designs into large design spaces using various optimization directives across multiple vendor tools, 2) a design synthesis stage to execute HLS and FPGA tool flows concurrently across designs, and 3) a data aggregation stage for extracting standardized data into packaged datasets for ML usage. This tripartite architecture ensures broad design space coverage via design space expansion and supports multiple vendor tools. Users can contribute to each stage with their own HLS designs and synthesis results and extend the framework itself with custom frontends and tool flows. We also include an initial set of built-in designs from common HLS benchmarks curated open-source HLS designs. We showcase the versatility and multi-functionality of our framework through six case studies: I) Design space sampling; II) Fine-grained parallelism backend speedup; III) Targeting Intel's HLS flow; IV) Adding new auxiliary designs; V) Integrating published HLS data; VI) HLS tool version regression benchmarking. Code at //github.com/sharc-lab/HLSFactory.
We introduce the Rigged Dynamic Mode Decomposition (Rigged DMD) algorithm, which computes generalized eigenfunction decompositions of Koopman operators. By considering the evolution of observables, Koopman operators transform complex nonlinear dynamics into a linear framework suitable for spectral analysis. While powerful, traditional Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) techniques often struggle with continuous spectra. Rigged DMD addresses these challenges with a data-driven methodology that approximates the Koopman operator's resolvent and its generalized eigenfunctions using snapshot data from the system's evolution. At its core, Rigged DMD builds wave-packet approximations for generalized Koopman eigenfunctions and modes by integrating Measure-Preserving Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition with high-order kernels for smoothing. This provides a robust decomposition encompassing both discrete and continuous spectral elements. We derive explicit high-order convergence theorems for generalized eigenfunctions and spectral measures. Additionally, we propose a novel framework for constructing rigged Hilbert spaces using time-delay embedding, significantly extending the algorithm's applicability. We provide examples, including systems with a Lebesgue spectrum, integrable Hamiltonian systems, the Lorenz system, and a high-Reynolds number lid-driven flow in a two-dimensional square cavity, demonstrating Rigged DMD's convergence, efficiency, and versatility. This work paves the way for future research and applications of decompositions with continuous spectra.
As an essential tool of secure distributed machine learning, vertical federated learning (VFL) based on homomorphic encryption (HE) suffers from severe efficiency problems due to data inflation and time-consuming operations. To this core, we propose PackVFL, an efficient VFL framework based on packed HE (PackedHE), to accelerate the existing HE-based VFL algorithms. PackVFL packs multiple cleartexts into one ciphertext and supports single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD)-style parallelism. We focus on designing a high-performant matrix multiplication (MatMult) method since it takes up most of the ciphertext computation time in HE-based VFL. Besides, devising the MatMult method is also challenging for PackedHE because a slight difference in the packing way could predominantly affect its computation and communication costs. Without domain-specific design, directly applying SOTA MatMult methods is hard to achieve optimal. Therefore, we make a three-fold design: 1) we systematically explore the current design space of MatMult and quantify the complexity of existing approaches to provide guidance; 2) we propose a hybrid MatMult method according to the unique characteristics of VFL; 3) we adaptively apply our hybrid method in representative VFL algorithms, leveraging distinctive algorithmic properties to further improve efficiency. As the batch size, feature dimension and model size of VFL scale up to large sizes, PackVFL consistently delivers enhanced performance. Empirically, PackVFL propels existing VFL algorithms to new heights, achieving up to a 51.52X end-to-end speedup. This represents a substantial 34.51X greater speedup compared to the direct application of SOTA MatMult methods.
Evaluating deep multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms is complicated by stochasticity in training and sensitivity of agent performance to the behavior of other agents. We propose a meta-game evaluation framework for deep MARL, by framing each MARL algorithm as a meta-strategy, and repeatedly sampling normal-form empirical games over combinations of meta-strategies resulting from different random seeds. Each empirical game captures both self-play and cross-play factors across seeds. These empirical games provide the basis for constructing a sampling distribution, using bootstrapping, over a variety of game analysis statistics. We use this approach to evaluate state-of-the-art deep MARL algorithms on a class of negotiation games. From statistics on individual payoffs, social welfare, and empirical best-response graphs, we uncover strategic relationships among self-play, population-based, model-free, and model-based MARL methods.We also investigate the effect of run-time search as a meta-strategy operator, and find via meta-game analysis that the search version of a meta-strategy generally leads to improved performance.
This paper introduces PDEformer, a neural solver for partial differential equations (PDEs) capable of simultaneously addressing various types of PDEs. We propose to represent the PDE in the form of a computational graph, facilitating the seamless integration of both symbolic and numerical information inherent in a PDE. A graph Transformer and an implicit neural representation (INR) are employed to generate mesh-free predicted solutions. Following pretraining on data exhibiting a certain level of diversity, our model achieves zero-shot accuracies on benchmark datasets that is comparable to those of specifically trained expert models. Additionally, PDEformer demonstrates promising results in the inverse problem of PDE coefficient recovery.
This work designs and analyzes a novel set of algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) based on the principle of information-directed sampling (IDS). These algorithms draw inspiration from foundational concepts in information theory, and are proven to be sample efficient in MARL settings such as two-player zero-sum Markov games (MGs) and multi-player general-sum MGs. For episodic two-player zero-sum MGs, we present three sample-efficient algorithms for learning Nash equilibrium. The basic algorithm, referred to as MAIDS, employs an asymmetric learning structure where the max-player first solves a minimax optimization problem based on the joint information ratio of the joint policy, and the min-player then minimizes the marginal information ratio with the max-player's policy fixed. Theoretical analyses show that it achieves a Bayesian regret of tilde{O}(sqrt{K}) for K episodes. To reduce the computational load of MAIDS, we develop an improved algorithm called Reg-MAIDS, which has the same Bayesian regret bound while enjoying less computational complexity. Moreover, by leveraging the flexibility of IDS principle in choosing the learning target, we propose two methods for constructing compressed environments based on rate-distortion theory, upon which we develop an algorithm Compressed-MAIDS wherein the learning target is a compressed environment. Finally, we extend Reg-MAIDS to multi-player general-sum MGs and prove that it can learn either the Nash equilibrium or coarse correlated equilibrium in a sample efficient manner.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
Semi-supervised learning on class-imbalanced data, although a realistic problem, has been under studied. While existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are known to perform poorly on minority classes, we find that they still generate high precision pseudo-labels on minority classes. By exploiting this property, in this work, we propose Class-Rebalancing Self-Training (CReST), a simple yet effective framework to improve existing SSL methods on class-imbalanced data. CReST iteratively retrains a baseline SSL model with a labeled set expanded by adding pseudo-labeled samples from an unlabeled set, where pseudo-labeled samples from minority classes are selected more frequently according to an estimated class distribution. We also propose a progressive distribution alignment to adaptively adjust the rebalancing strength dubbed CReST+. We show that CReST and CReST+ improve state-of-the-art SSL algorithms on various class-imbalanced datasets and consistently outperform other popular rebalancing methods.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.