5,678 research outputs found
Hierarchical Decomposition of Nonlinear Dynamics and Control for System Identification and Policy Distillation
The control of nonlinear dynamical systems remains a major challenge for
autonomous agents. Current trends in reinforcement learning (RL) focus on
complex representations of dynamics and policies, which have yielded impressive
results in solving a variety of hard control tasks. However, this new
sophistication and extremely over-parameterized models have come with the cost
of an overall reduction in our ability to interpret the resulting policies. In
this paper, we take inspiration from the control community and apply the
principles of hybrid switching systems in order to break down complex dynamics
into simpler components. We exploit the rich representational power of
probabilistic graphical models and derive an expectation-maximization (EM)
algorithm for learning a sequence model to capture the temporal structure of
the data and automatically decompose nonlinear dynamics into stochastic
switching linear dynamical systems. Moreover, we show how this framework of
switching models enables extracting hierarchies of Markovian and
auto-regressive locally linear controllers from nonlinear experts in an
imitation learning scenario.Comment: 2nd Annual Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Contro
A Benchmark Environment Motivated by Industrial Control Problems
In the research area of reinforcement learning (RL), frequently novel and
promising methods are developed and introduced to the RL community. However,
although many researchers are keen to apply their methods on real-world
problems, implementing such methods in real industry environments often is a
frustrating and tedious process. Generally, academic research groups have only
limited access to real industrial data and applications. For this reason, new
methods are usually developed, evaluated and compared by using artificial
software benchmarks. On one hand, these benchmarks are designed to provide
interpretable RL training scenarios and detailed insight into the learning
process of the method on hand. On the other hand, they usually do not share
much similarity with industrial real-world applications. For this reason we
used our industry experience to design a benchmark which bridges the gap
between freely available, documented, and motivated artificial benchmarks and
properties of real industrial problems. The resulting industrial benchmark (IB)
has been made publicly available to the RL community by publishing its Java and
Python code, including an OpenAI Gym wrapper, on Github. In this paper we
motivate and describe in detail the IB's dynamics and identify prototypic
experimental settings that capture common situations in real-world industry
control problems
A Benchmark Environment Motivated by Industrial Control Problems
In the research area of reinforcement learning (RL), frequently novel and
promising methods are developed and introduced to the RL community. However,
although many researchers are keen to apply their methods on real-world
problems, implementing such methods in real industry environments often is a
frustrating and tedious process. Generally, academic research groups have only
limited access to real industrial data and applications. For this reason, new
methods are usually developed, evaluated and compared by using artificial
software benchmarks. On one hand, these benchmarks are designed to provide
interpretable RL training scenarios and detailed insight into the learning
process of the method on hand. On the other hand, they usually do not share
much similarity with industrial real-world applications. For this reason we
used our industry experience to design a benchmark which bridges the gap
between freely available, documented, and motivated artificial benchmarks and
properties of real industrial problems. The resulting industrial benchmark (IB)
has been made publicly available to the RL community by publishing its Java and
Python code, including an OpenAI Gym wrapper, on Github. In this paper we
motivate and describe in detail the IB's dynamics and identify prototypic
experimental settings that capture common situations in real-world industry
control problems
Completely-Positive Non-Markovian Decoherence
We propose an effective Hamiltonian approach to investigate decoherence of a
quantum system in a non-Markovian reservoir, naturally imposing the complete
positivity on the reduced dynamics of the system. The formalism is based on the
notion of an effective reservoir, i.e., certain collective degrees of freedom
in the reservoir that are responsible for the decoherence. As examples for
completely positive decoherence, we present three typical decoherence processes
for a qubit such as dephasing, depolarizing, and amplitude-damping. The effects
of the non-Markovian decoherence are compared to the Markovian decoherence.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur
Algorithmic quantum simulation of memory effects
We propose a method for the algorithmic quantum simulation of memory effects
described by integrodifferential evolution equations. It consists in the
systematic use of perturbation theory techniques and a Markovian quantum
simulator. Our method aims to efficiently simulate both completely positive and
nonpositive dynamics without the requirement of engineering non-Markovian
environments. Finally, we find that small error bounds can be reached with
polynomially scaling resources, evaluated as the time required for the
simulation
LTLf/LDLf Non-Markovian Rewards
In Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), the reward obtained in a state is Markovian, i.e., depends on the last state and action. This dependency makes it difficult to reward more interesting long-term behaviors, such as always closing a door after it has been opened, or providing coffee only following a request. Extending MDPs to handle non-Markovian reward functions was the subject of two previous lines of work. Both use LTL variants to specify the reward function and then compile the new model back into a Markovian model. Building on recent progress in temporal logics over finite traces, we adopt LDLf for specifying non-Markovian rewards and provide an elegant automata construction for building a Markovian model, which extends that of previous work and offers strong minimality and compositionality guarantees
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