2023-11-14 更新
An Intelligent Social Learning-based Optimization Strategy for Black-box Robotic Control with Reinforcement Learning
Authors:Xubo Yang, Jian Gao, Ting Wang, Yaozhen He
Implementing intelligent control of robots is a difficult task, especially when dealing with complex black-box systems, because of the lack of visibility and understanding of how these robots work internally. This paper proposes an Intelligent Social Learning (ISL) algorithm to enable intelligent control of black-box robotic systems. Inspired by mutual learning among individuals in human social groups, ISL includes learning, imitation, and self-study styles. Individuals in the learning style use the Levy flight search strategy to learn from the best performer and form the closest relationships. In the imitation style, individuals mimic the best performer with a second-level rapport by employing a random perturbation strategy. In the self-study style, individuals learn independently using a normal distribution sampling method while maintaining a distant relationship with the best performer. Individuals in the population are regarded as autonomous intelligent agents in each style. Neural networks perform strategic actions in three styles to interact with the environment and the robot and iteratively optimize the network policy. Overall, ISL builds on the principles of intelligent optimization, incorporating ideas from reinforcement learning, and possesses strong search capabilities, fast computation speed, fewer hyperparameters, and insensitivity to sparse rewards. The proposed ISL algorithm is compared with four state-of-the-art methods on six continuous control benchmark cases in MuJoCo to verify its effectiveness and advantages. Furthermore, ISL is adopted in the simulation and experimental grasping tasks of the UR3 robot for validations, and satisfactory solutions are yielded.
PDF
点此查看论文截图
Dream to Adapt: Meta Reinforcement Learning by Latent Context Imagination and MDP Imagination
Authors:Lu Wen, Songan Zhang, H. Eric Tseng, Huei Peng
Meta reinforcement learning (Meta RL) has been amply explored to quickly learn an unseen task by transferring previously learned knowledge from similar tasks. However, most state-of-the-art algorithms require the meta-training tasks to have a dense coverage on the task distribution and a great amount of data for each of them. In this paper, we propose MetaDreamer, a context-based Meta RL algorithm that requires less real training tasks and data by doing meta-imagination and MDP-imagination. We perform meta-imagination by interpolating on the learned latent context space with disentangled properties, as well as MDP-imagination through the generative world model where physical knowledge is added to plain VAE networks. Our experiments with various benchmarks show that MetaDreamer outperforms existing approaches in data efficiency and interpolated generalization.
PDF
点此查看论文截图
An advantage based policy transfer algorithm for reinforcement learning with metrics of transferability
Authors:Md Ferdous Alam, Parinaz Naghizadeh, David Hoelzle
Reinforcement learning (RL) can enable sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments if the acquisition of a new state-action pair is efficient, i.e., when interaction with the environment is inexpensive. However, there are a myriad of real-world applications in which a high number of interactions are infeasible. In these environments, transfer RL algorithms, which can be used for the transfer of knowledge from one or multiple source environments to a target environment, have been shown to increase learning speed and improve initial and asymptotic performance. However, most existing transfer RL algorithms are on-policy and sample inefficient, and often require heuristic choices in algorithm design. This paper proposes an off-policy Advantage-based Policy Transfer algorithm, APT-RL, for fixed domain environments. Its novelty is in using the popular notion of ``advantage’’ as a regularizer, to weigh the knowledge that should be transferred from the source, relative to new knowledge learned in the target, removing the need for heuristic choices. Further, we propose a new transfer performance metric to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and unify existing transfer RL frameworks. Finally, we present a scalable, theoretically-backed task similarity measurement algorithm to illustrate the alignments between our proposed transferability metric and similarities between source and target environments. Numerical experiments on three continuous control benchmark tasks demonstrate that APT-RL outperforms existing transfer RL algorithms on most tasks, and is $10\%$ to $75\%$ more sample efficient than learning from scratch.
PDF
点此查看论文截图
FLASH-RL: Federated Learning Addressing System and Static Heterogeneity using Reinforcement Learning
Authors:Sofiane Bouaziz, Hadjer Benmeziane, Youcef Imine, Leila Hamdad, Smail Niar, Hamza Ouarnoughi
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising Machine Learning paradigm, enabling multiple users to collaboratively train a shared model while preserving their local data. To minimize computing and communication costs associated with parameter transfer, it is common practice in FL to select a subset of clients in each training round. This selection must consider both system and static heterogeneity. Therefore, we propose FLASH-RL, a framework that utilizes Double Deep QLearning (DDQL) to address both system and static heterogeneity in FL. FLASH-RL introduces a new reputation-based utility function to evaluate client contributions based on their current and past performances. Additionally, an adapted DDQL algorithm is proposed to expedite the learning process. Experimental results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets have shown FLASH-RL’s effectiveness in achieving a balanced trade-off between model performance and end-to-end latency against existing solutions. Indeed, FLASH-RL reduces latency by up to 24.83% compared to FedAVG and 24.67% compared to FAVOR. It also reduces the training rounds by up to 60.44% compared to FedAVG and +76% compared to FAVOR. In fall detection using the MobiAct dataset, FLASH-RL outperforms FedAVG by up to 2.82% in model’s performance and reduces latency by up to 34.75%. Additionally, FLASH-RL achieves the target performance faster, with up to a 45.32% reduction in training rounds compared to FedAVG.
PDF Accepted in the 41st IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD 2023)
点此查看论文截图
Data-Efficient Task Generalization via Probabilistic Model-based Meta Reinforcement Learning
Authors:Arjun Bhardwaj, Jonas Rothfuss, Bhavya Sukhija, Yarden As, Marco Hutter, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause
We introduce PACOH-RL, a novel model-based Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) algorithm designed to efficiently adapt control policies to changing dynamics. PACOH-RL meta-learns priors for the dynamics model, allowing swift adaptation to new dynamics with minimal interaction data. Existing Meta-RL methods require abundant meta-learning data, limiting their applicability in settings such as robotics, where data is costly to obtain. To address this, PACOH-RL incorporates regularization and epistemic uncertainty quantification in both the meta-learning and task adaptation stages. When facing new dynamics, we use these uncertainty estimates to effectively guide exploration and data collection. Overall, this enables positive transfer, even when access to data from prior tasks or dynamic settings is severely limited. Our experiment results demonstrate that PACOH-RL outperforms model-based RL and model-based Meta-RL baselines in adapting to new dynamic conditions. Finally, on a real robotic car, we showcase the potential for efficient RL policy adaptation in diverse, data-scarce conditions.
PDF