Generic Online Learning for Partial Visible & Dynamic Environment with Delayed Feedback

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to robotics and many other domains which a system must learn in real-time and interact with a dynamic environment. In most studies the state- action space that is the key part of RL is predefined. Integration of RL with deep learning method has however taken a tremendous leap forward to solve novel challenging problems such as mastering a board game of Go. The surrounding environment to the agent may not be fully visible, the environment can change over time, and the feedbacks that agent receives for its actions can have a fluctuating delay. In this paper, we propose a Generic Online Learning (GOL) system for such environments. GOL is based on RL with a hierarchical structure to form abstract features in time and adapt to the optimal solutions. The proposed method has been applied to load balancing in 5G cloud random access networks. Simulation results show that GOL successfully achieves the system objectives of reducing cache-misses and communication load, while incurring only limited system overhead in terms of number of high-level patterns needed. We believe that the proposed GOL architecture is significant for future online learning of dynamic, partially visible environments, and would be very useful for many autonomous control systems

You Can\u27t Get There from Here: Movement SF and the Picaresque

This dissertation examines the crisis of authenticity in postmodern culture and argues that contemporary science fiction, specifically the subgenre of Movement SF, has evolved a unique answer to this crisis by adopting, perhaps spontaneously, the picaresque narrative structure. Postmodern fiction has a tenuous relationship with the issue of authenticity, such that the average postmodern subject is utterly without true authenticity at all, alternately victim to the socioeconomic conditions of his or her culture and to the elision of the self as a result of the homogenizing effects of advertising, television, etc. Postmodern SF also carries this bleak perception of the possibility of agency; William Gibson\u27s Sprawl and Bridge trilogies are rife with negations of human agency at the metaphorical hands of various aspects and incarnations of what Fredric Jameson terms the technological sublime. This dissertation puts forth the argument that a group of post-Eighties SF texts all participate in a spontaneous revival of the picaresque mode, using the picaresque journey and related motifs to re-authenticate subjects whose identity and agency are being erased by powerful social and economic forces exterior to and normally imperceptible by the individual. This dissertation is organized around three loosely connected parts. Part 1 attempts to define Movement SF by separating the various, often confusing marketing labels (such as cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, etc.) and extracting a cluster of core characteristics that have shaped the genre since its inception in the early 80s. Part 1 further examines how these core characteristics (or premises) of Movement SF provide fertile ground for picaresque narrative strategies. Part 2 describes in detail the picaresque as it appears in Movement SF, examining worldbuilding strategies, the persistence and evolution of tropes and motifs common to the traditional picaresque, and the generation of new tropes and motifs unique to Movement picaresques. Part 3 examines the spatial tactics used in Movement picaresque narratives to enable picaresque marginality in totalized, globalized environments. Furthermore, Part 3 examines the use of psychological plurality as an internal tactic to escape closed environments

Diffracting (meta)‘fictions’: performativity, neocybernetics, diffraction, and the living practice/s of story through select metafictional novels

This thesis aims to re-energize metafiction studies through the frameworks of performativity, neocybernetics, and diffraction. My contention is that the human experience can be viewed as a metafictioning manifold, i.e., an active self-perpetuating entanglement and emergence of narrativizing structures. Metafictions, then, are living artifacts that model the metafictional processes of our constructed realities, while also actively re-organizing our experiences, and acting as heuristics for engaging with the world in metafictional ways. Renewed attention should be given to metafictionality, and in particular to metafictional artifacts, so as to better engage with our material reality as co-participant storytellers alongside the objects and systems around us. The introductory chapter sets the critical and methodological stage. Chapter One uses David Markson’s This is not a Novel (2001) to demonstrate the performativity of metafictions and objects. Chapter Two discusses The Third Policeman (1967) by Flann O’Brien and identifies metafictions as living systems. Chapter Three looks at Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (1970) in order to theorize the agential natures of such object-systems. Finally, Chapter Four investigates the heuristic ethos of a metafictioning manifold through Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar (2015)