Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known sample-inefficiency problem. This means that the algorithms are data-hungry and require millions of training samples to converge to an adequate policy. One way to combat this issue is to use action advising in a teacher-student framework, where a knowledgeable teacher provides action advice to help the student. This work considers how to better leverage uncertainties about when a student should ask for advice and if the student can model the teacher to ask for less advice. The student could decide to ask for advice when it is uncertain or when both it and its model of the teacher are uncertain. In addition to this investigation, this paper introduces a new method to compute uncertainty for a deep RL agent using a secondary neural network. Our empirical results show that using dual uncertainties to drive advice collection and reuse may improve learning performance across several Atari games.
Many real-world settings involve costs for performing actions; transaction costs in financial systems and fuel costs being common examples. In these settings, performing actions at each time step quickly accumulates costs leading to vastly suboptimal outcomes. Additionally, repeatedly acting produces wear and tear and ultimately, damage. Determining when to act is crucial for achieving successful outcomes and yet, the challenge of efficiently learning to behave optimally when actions incur minimally bounded costs remains unresolved. In this paper, we introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework named Learnable Impulse Control Reinforcement Algorithm (LICRA), for learning to optimally select both when to act and which actions to take when actions incur costs. At the core of LICRA is a nested structure that combines RL and a form of policy known as impulse control which learns to maximise objectives when actions incur costs. We prove that LICRA, which seamlessly adopts any RL method, converges to policies that optimally select when to perform actions and their optimal magnitudes. We then augment LICRA to handle problems in which the agent can perform at most $k<\infty$ actions and more generally, faces a budget constraint. We show LICRA learns the optimal value function and ensures budget constraints are satisfied almost surely. We demonstrate empirically LICRA's superior performance against benchmark RL methods in OpenAI gym's Lunar Lander and in Highway environments and a variant of the Merton portfolio problem within finance.
Wireless communications systems are impacted by multi-path fading and Doppler shift in dynamic environments, where the channel becomes doubly-dispersive and its estimation becomes an arduous task. Only a few pilots are used for channel estimation in conventional approaches to preserve high data rate transmission. Consequently, such estimators experience a significant performance degradation in high mobility scenarios. Recently, deep learning has been employed for doubly-dispersive channel estimation due to its low-complexity, robustness, and good generalization ability. Against this backdrop, the current paper presents a comprehensive survey on channel estimation techniques based on deep learning by deeply investigating different methods. The study also provides extensive experimental simulations followed by a computational complexity analysis. After considering different parameters such as modulation order, mobility, frame length, and deep learning architecture, the performance of the studied estimators is evaluated in several mobility scenarios. In addition, the source codes are made available online in order to make the results reproducible.
We discover restrained numerical instabilities in current training practices of deep networks with SGD. We show numerical error (on the order of the smallest floating point bit) induced from floating point arithmetic in training deep nets can be amplified significantly and result in significant test accuracy variance, comparable to the test accuracy variance due to stochasticity in SGD. We show how this is likely traced to instabilities of the optimization dynamics that are restrained, i.e., localized over iterations and regions of the weight tensor space. We do this by presenting a theoretical framework using numerical analysis of partial differential equations (PDE), and analyzing the gradient descent PDE of a simplified convolutional neural network (CNN). We show that it is stable only under certain conditions on the learning rate and weight decay. We reproduce the localized instabilities in the PDE for the simplified network, which arise when the conditions are violated.
Congestion Control (CC), as the core networking task to efficiently utilize network capacity, received great attention and widely used in various Internet communication applications such as 5G, Internet-of-Things, UAN, and more. Various CC algorithms have been proposed both on network and transport layers such as Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithm and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) congestion control mechanism. But it is hard to model dynamic AQM/TCP system and cooperate two algorithms to obtain excellent performance under different communication scenarios. In this paper, we explore the performance of multi-agent reinforcement learning-based cross-layer congestion control algorithms and present cooperation performance of two agents, known as MACC (Multi-agent Congestion Control). We implement MACC in NS3. The simulation results show that our scheme outperforms other congestion control combination in terms of throughput and delay, etc. Not only does it proves that networking protocols based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning is efficient for communication managing, but also verifies that networking area can be used as new playground for machine learning algorithms.
In this work, we study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) in unknown stabilizable linear dynamical systems. When learning a dynamical system, one needs to stabilize the unknown dynamics in order to avoid system blow-ups. We propose an algorithm that certifies fast stabilization of the underlying system by effectively exploring the environment with an improved exploration strategy. We show that the proposed algorithm attains $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret after $T$ time steps of agent-environment interaction. We also show that the regret of the proposed algorithm has only a polynomial dependence in the problem dimensions, which gives an exponential improvement over the prior methods. Our improved exploration method is simple, yet efficient, and it combines a sophisticated exploration policy in RL with an isotropic exploration strategy to achieve fast stabilization and improved regret. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other popular methods in several adaptive control tasks.
In deep reinforcement learning (RL), data augmentation is widely considered as a tool to induce a set of useful priors about semantic consistency and improve sample efficiency and generalization performance. However, even when the prior is useful for generalization, distilling it to RL agent often interferes with RL training and degenerates sample efficiency. Meanwhile, the agent is forgetful of the prior due to the non-stationary nature of RL. These observations suggest two extreme schedules of distillation: (i) over the entire training; or (ii) only at the end. Hence, we devise a stand-alone network distillation method to inject the consistency prior at any time (even after RL), and a simple yet efficient framework to automatically schedule the distillation. Specifically, the proposed framework first focuses on mastering train environments regardless of generalization by adaptively deciding which {\it or no} augmentation to be used for the training. After this, we add the distillation to extract the remaining benefits for generalization from all the augmentations, which requires no additional new samples. In our experiments, we demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework, in particular, that considers postponing the augmentation to the end of RL training.
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.
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.
This paper presents a new multi-objective deep reinforcement learning (MODRL) framework based on deep Q-networks. We propose the use of linear and non-linear methods to develop the MODRL framework that includes both single-policy and multi-policy strategies. The experimental results on two benchmark problems including the two-objective deep sea treasure environment and the three-objective mountain car problem indicate that the proposed framework is able to converge to the optimal Pareto solutions effectively. The proposed framework is generic, which allows implementation of different deep reinforcement learning algorithms in different complex environments. This therefore overcomes many difficulties involved with standard multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) methods existing in the current literature. The framework creates a platform as a testbed environment to develop methods for solving various problems associated with the current MORL. Details of the framework implementation can be referred to //www.deakin.edu.au/~thanhthi/drl.htm.