Controller synthesis is in essence a case of model-based planning for non-deterministic environments in which plans (actually ''strategies'') are meant to preserve system goals indefinitely. In the case of supervisory control environments are specified as the parallel composition of state machines and valid strategies are required to be ''non-blocking'' (i.e., always enabling the environment to reach certain marked states) in addition to safe (i.e., keep the system within a safe zone). Recently, On-the-fly Directed Controller Synthesis techniques were proposed to avoid the exploration of the entire -and exponentially large-environment space, at the cost of non-maximal permissiveness, to either find a strategy or conclude that there is none. The incremental exploration of the plant is currently guided by a domain-independent human-designed heuristic. In this work, we propose a new method for obtaining heuristics based on Reinforcement Learning (RL). The synthesis algorithm is thus framed as an RL task with an unbounded action space and a modified version of DQN is used. With a simple and general set of features that abstracts both states and actions, we show that it is possible to learn heuristics on small versions of a problem that generalize to the larger instances, effectively doing zero-shot policy transfer. Our agents learn from scratch in a highly partially observable RL task and outperform the existing heuristic overall, in instances unseen during training.
We explore sim-to-real transfer of deep reinforcement learning controllers for a heavy vehicle with active suspensions designed for traversing rough terrain. While related research primarily focuses on lightweight robots with electric motors and fast actuation, this study uses a forestry vehicle with a complex hydraulic driveline and slow actuation. We simulate the vehicle using multibody dynamics and apply system identification to find an appropriate set of simulation parameters. We then train policies in simulation using various techniques to mitigate the sim-to-real gap, including domain randomization, action delays, and a reward penalty to encourage smooth control. In reality, the policies trained with action delays and a penalty for erratic actions perform at nearly the same level as in simulation. In experiments on level ground, the motion trajectories closely overlap when turning to either side, as well as in a route tracking scenario. When faced with a ramp that requires active use of the suspensions, the simulated and real motions are in close alignment. This shows that the actuator model together with system identification yields a sufficiently accurate model of the actuators. We observe that policies trained without the additional action penalty exhibit fast switching or bang-bang control. These present smooth motions and high performance in simulation but transfer poorly to reality. We find that policies make marginal use of the local height map for perception, showing no indications of look-ahead planning. However, the strong transfer capabilities entail that further development concerning perception and performance can be largely confined to simulation.
Before taking actions in an environment with more than one intelligent agent, an autonomous agent may benefit from reasoning about the other agents and utilizing a notion of a guarantee or confidence about the behavior of the system. In this article, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm CAMMARL, which involves modeling the actions of other agents in different situations in the form of confident sets, i.e., sets containing their true actions with a high probability. We then use these estimates to inform an agent's decision-making. For estimating such sets, we use the concept of conformal predictions, by means of which, we not only obtain an estimate of the most probable outcome but get to quantify the operable uncertainty as well. For instance, we can predict a set that provably covers the true predictions with high probabilities (e.g., 95%). Through several experiments in two fully cooperative multi-agent tasks, we show that CAMMARL elevates the capabilities of an autonomous agent in MARL by modeling conformal prediction sets over the behavior of other agents in the environment and utilizing such estimates to enhance its policy learning. All developed codes can be found here: //github.com/Nikunj-Gupta/conformal-agent-modelling.
In this paper, we study the statistical efficiency of Reinforcement Learning in Mean-Field Control (MFC) and Mean-Field Game (MFG) with general function approximation. We introduce a new concept called Mean-Field Model-Based Eluder Dimension (MBED), which subsumes a rich family of Mean-Field RL problems. Additionally, we propose algorithms based on Optimistic Maximal Likelihood Estimation, which can return an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for MFC or an $\epsilon$-Nash Equilibrium policy for MFG, with sample complexity polynomial w.r.t. relevant parameters and independent of the number of states, actions and the number of agents. Notably, our results only require a mild assumption of Lipschitz continuity on transition dynamics and avoid strong structural assumptions in previous work. Finally, in the tabular setting, given the access to a generative model, we establish an exponential lower bound for MFC setting, while providing a novel sample-efficient model elimination algorithm to approximate equilibrium in MFG setting. Our results reveal a fundamental separation between RL for single-agent, MFC, and MFG from the sample efficiency perspective.
The autonomous control of flippers plays an important role in enhancing the intelligent operation of tracked robots within complex environments. While existing methods mainly rely on hand-crafted control models, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach that leverages deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques for autonomous flipper control in complex terrains. Specifically, we propose a new DRL network named AT-D3QN, which ensures safe and smooth flipper control for tracked robots. It comprises two modules, a feature extraction and fusion module for extracting and integrating robot and environment state features, and a deep Q-Learning control generation module for incorporating expert knowledge to obtain a smooth and efficient control strategy. To train the network, a novel reward function is proposed, considering both learning efficiency and passing smoothness. A simulation environment is constructed using the Pymunk physics engine for training. We then directly apply the trained model to a more realistic Gazebo simulation for quantitative analysis. The consistently high performance of the proposed approach validates its superiority over manual teleoperation.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in creating robust policies for robotics tasks. However, contemporary RL algorithms are data-hungry, often requiring billions of environment transitions to train successful policies. This necessitates the use of fast and highly-parallelizable simulators. In addition to speed, such simulators need to model the physics of the robots and their interaction with the environment to a level acceptable for transferring policies learned in simulation to reality. We present QuadSwarm, a fast, reliable simulator for research in single and multi-robot RL for quadrotors that addresses both issues. QuadSwarm, with fast forward-dynamics propagation decoupled from rendering, is designed to be highly parallelizable such that throughput scales linearly with additional compute. It provides multiple components tailored toward multi-robot RL, including diverse training scenarios, and provides domain randomization to facilitate the development and sim2real transfer of multi-quadrotor control policies. Initial experiments suggest that QuadSwarm achieves over 48,500 simulation samples per second (SPS) on a single quadrotor and over 62,000 SPS on eight quadrotors on a 16-core CPU. The code can be found in //github.com/Zhehui-Huang/quad-swarm-rl.
Reinforcement learning is able to solve complex sequential decision-making tasks but is currently limited by sample efficiency and required computation. To improve sample efficiency, recent work focuses on model-based RL which interleaves model learning with planning. Recent methods further utilize policy learning, value estimation, and, self-supervised learning as auxiliary objectives. In this paper we show that, surprisingly, a simple representation learning approach relying only on a latent dynamics model trained by latent temporal consistency is sufficient for high-performance RL. This applies when using pure planning with a dynamics model conditioned on the representation, but, also when utilizing the representation as policy and value function features in model-free RL. In experiments, our approach learns an accurate dynamics model to solve challenging high-dimensional locomotion tasks with online planners while being 4.1 times faster to train compared to ensemble-based methods. With model-free RL without planning, especially on high-dimensional tasks, such as the DeepMind Control Suite Humanoid and Dog tasks, our approach outperforms model-free methods by a large margin and matches model-based methods' sample efficiency while training 2.4 times faster.
Graph mining tasks arise from many different application domains, ranging from social networks, transportation, E-commerce, etc., which have been receiving great attention from the theoretical and algorithm design communities in recent years, and there has been some pioneering work using the hotly researched reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to address graph data mining tasks. However, these graph mining algorithms and RL models are dispersed in different research areas, which makes it hard to compare different algorithms with each other. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of RL models and graph mining and generalize these algorithms to Graph Reinforcement Learning (GRL) as a unified formulation. We further discuss the applications of GRL methods across various domains and summarize the method description, open-source codes, and benchmark datasets of GRL methods. Finally, we propose possible important directions and challenges to be solved in the future. This is the latest work on a comprehensive survey of GRL literature, and this work provides a global view for researchers as well as a learning resource for researchers outside the domain. In addition, we create an online open-source for both interested researchers who want to enter this rapidly developing domain and experts who would like to compare GRL methods.
Multimodal learning helps to comprehensively understand the world, by integrating different senses. Accordingly, multiple input modalities are expected to boost model performance, but we actually find that they are not fully exploited even when the multimodal model outperforms its uni-modal counterpart. Specifically, in this paper we point out that existing multimodal discriminative models, in which uniform objective is designed for all modalities, could remain under-optimized uni-modal representations, caused by another dominated modality in some scenarios, e.g., sound in blowing wind event, vision in drawing picture event, etc. To alleviate this optimization imbalance, we propose on-the-fly gradient modulation to adaptively control the optimization of each modality, via monitoring the discrepancy of their contribution towards the learning objective. Further, an extra Gaussian noise that changes dynamically is introduced to avoid possible generalization drop caused by gradient modulation. As a result, we achieve considerable improvement over common fusion methods on different multimodal tasks, and this simple strategy can also boost existing multimodal methods, which illustrates its efficacy and versatility. The source code is available at \url{//github.com/GeWu-Lab/OGM-GE_CVPR2022}.
Data processing and analytics are fundamental and pervasive. Algorithms play a vital role in data processing and analytics where many algorithm designs have incorporated heuristics and general rules from human knowledge and experience to improve their effectiveness. Recently, reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in particular, is increasingly explored and exploited in many areas because it can learn better strategies in complicated environments it is interacting with than statically designed algorithms. Motivated by this trend, we provide a comprehensive review of recent works focusing on utilizing DRL to improve data processing and analytics. First, we present an introduction to key concepts, theories, and methods in DRL. Next, we discuss DRL deployment on database systems, facilitating data processing and analytics in various aspects, including data organization, scheduling, tuning, and indexing. Then, we survey the application of DRL in data processing and analytics, ranging from data preparation, natural language processing to healthcare, fintech, etc. Finally, we discuss important open challenges and future research directions of using DRL in data processing and analytics.
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.