Experience Sharing Between Cooperative Reinforcement Learning Agents

The idea of experience sharing between cooperative agents naturally emerges from our understanding of how humans learn. Our evolution as a species is tightly linked to the ability to exchange learned knowledge with one another. It follows that experience sharing (ES) between autonomous and independent agents could become the key to accelerate learning in cooperative multiagent settings. We investigate if randomly selecting experiences to share can increase the performance of deep reinforcement learning agents, and propose three new methods for selecting experiences to accelerate the learning process. Firstly, we introduce Focused ES, which prioritizes unexplored regions of the state space. Secondly, we present Prioritized ES, in which temporal-difference error is used as a measure of priority. Finally, we devise Focused Prioritized ES, which combines both previous approaches. The methods are empirically validated in a control problem. While sharing randomly selected experiences between two Deep Q-Network agents shows no improvement over a single agent baseline, we show that the proposed ES methods can successfully outperform the baseline. In particular, the Focused ES accelerates learning by a factor of 2, reducing by 51% the number of episodes required to complete the task.Comment: Published at the Proceedings of the 31st IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligenc

Online contrastive divergence with generative replay: experience replay without storing data

Conceived in the early 1990s, Experience Replay (ER) has been shown to be a successful mechanism to allow online learning algorithms to reuse past experiences. Traditionally, ER can be applied to all machine learning paradigms (i.e., unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning). Recently, ER has contributed to improving the performance of deep reinforcement learning. Yet, its application to many practical settings is still limited by the memory requirements of ER, necessary to explicitly store previous observations. To remedy this issue, we explore a novel approach, Online Contrastive Divergence with Generative Replay (OCD_GR), which uses the generative capability of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) instead of recorded past experiences. The RBM is trained online, and does not require the system to store any of the observed data points. We compare OCD_GR to ER on 9 real-world datasets, considering a worst-case scenario (data points arriving in sorted order) as well as a more realistic one (sequential random-order data points). Our results show that in 64.28% of the cases OCD_GR outperforms ER and in the remaining 35.72% it has an almost equal performance, while having a considerably reduced space complexity (i.e., memory usage) at a comparable time complexity

Q-learning with Experience Replay in a Dynamic Environment

Most research in reinforcement learning has focused on stationary environments. In this paper, we propose several adaptations of Q-learning for a dynamic environment, for both single and multiple agents. The environment consists of a grid of random rewards, where every reward is removed after a visit. We focus on experience replay, a technique that receives a lot of attention nowadays, and combine this method with Q-learning. We compare two variations of experience replay, where experiences are reused based on time or based on the obtained reward. For multi-agent reinforcement learning we compare two variations of policy representation. In the first variation the agents share a Q-function, while in the second variation both agents have a separate Q-function. Furthermore, in both variations we test the effect of reward sharing between the agents. This leads to four different multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms, from which sharing a Q-function and sharing the rewards is the most cooperative method. The results show that in the single-agent environment both experience replay algorithms significantly outperform standard Q-learning and a greedy benchmark agent. In the multi-agent environment the highest maximum reward sum in a trial is achieved by using one Q-function and reward sharing. The highest mean reward sum is obtained with separate Q-functions and separate rewards

Fitted Q-iteration in continuous action-space MDPs

We consider continuous state, continuous action batch reinforcement learning where the goal is to learn a good policy from a sufficiently rich trajectory generated by some policy. We study a variant of fitted Q-iteration, where the greedy action selection is replaced by searching for a policy in a restricted set of candidate policies by maximizing the average action values. We provide a rigorous analysis of this algorithm, proving what we believe is the first finite-time bound for value-function based algorithms for continuous state and action problems

Swarm robotics: Cooperative navigation in unknown environments

Swarm Robotics is garnering attention in the robotics field due to its substantial benefits. It has been proven to outperform most other robotic approaches in many applications such as military, space exploration and disaster search and rescue missions. It is inspired by the behavior of swarms of social insects such as ants and bees. It consists of a number of robots with limited capabilities and restricted local sensing. When deployed, individual robots behave according to local sensing until the emergence of a global behavior where they, as a swarm, can accomplish missions individuals cannot. In this research, we propose a novel exploration and navigation method based on a combination of Probabilistic Finite Sate Machine (PFSM), Robotic Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimization (RDPSO) and Depth First Search (DFS). We use V-REP Simulator to test our approach. We are also implementing our own cost effective swarm robot platform, AntBOT, as a proof of concept for future experimentation. We prove that our proposed method will yield excellent navigation solution in optimal time when compared to methods using either PFSM only or RDPSO only. In fact, our method is proved to produce 40% more success rate along with an exploration speed of 1.4x other methods. After exploration, robots can navigate the environment forming a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) and using the graph of robots as network nodes

Advancing the Applicability of Reinforcement Learning to Autonomous Control

Mit dateneffizientem Reinforcement Learning (RL) konnten beeindruckendeErgebnisse erzielt werden, z.B. für die Regelung von Gasturbinen. In derPraxis erfordert die Anwendung von RL jedoch noch viel manuelle Arbeit, wasbisher RL für die autonome Regelung untauglich erscheinen ließ. Dievorliegende Arbeit adressiert einige der verbleibenden Probleme, insbesonderein Bezug auf die Zuverlässigkeit der Policy-Erstellung. Es werden zunächst RL-Probleme mit diskreten Zustands- und Aktionsräumenbetrachtet. Für solche Probleme wird häufig ein MDP aus Beobachtungengeschätzt, um dann auf Basis dieser MDP-Schätzung eine Policy abzuleiten. DieArbeit beschreibt, wie die Schätzer-Unsicherheit des MDP in diePolicy-Erstellung eingebracht werden kann, um mit diesem Wissen das Risikoeiner schlechten Policy aufgrund einer fehlerhaften MDP-Schätzung zuverringern. Außerdem wird so effiziente Exploration sowie Policy-Bewertungermöglicht. Anschließend wendet sich die Arbeit Problemen mit kontinuierlichenZustandsräumen zu und konzentriert sich auf auf RL-Verfahren, welche aufFitted Q-Iteration (FQI) basieren, insbesondere Neural Fitted Q-Iteration(NFQ). Zwar ist NFQ sehr dateneffizient, jedoch nicht so zuverlässig, wie fürdie autonome Regelung nötig wäre. Die Arbeit schlägt die Verwendung vonEnsembles vor, um die Zuverlässigkeit von NFQ zu erhöhen. Es werden eine Reihevon Möglichkeiten der Ensemble-Nutzung entworfen und evaluiert. Bei allenbetrachteten RL-Problemen sorgen Ensembles für eine zuverlässigere Erstellungguter Policies. Im nächsten Schritt werden Möglichkeiten der Policy-Bewertung beikontinuierlichen Zustandsräumen besprochen. Die Arbeit schlägt vor, FittedPolicy Evaluation (FPE), eine Variante von FQI für Policy Evaluation, mitanderen Regressionsverfahren und/oder anderen Datensätzen zu kombinieren, umein Maß für die Policy-Qualität zu erhalten. Experimente zeigen, dassExtra-Tree-FPE ein realistisches Qualitätsmaß für NFQ-generierte Policies liefernkann. Schließlich kombiniert die Arbeit Ensembles und Policy-Bewertung, um mit sichändernden RL-Problemen umzugehen. Der wesentliche Beitrag ist das EvolvingEnsemble, dessen Policy sich langsam ändert, indem alte, untaugliche Policiesentfernt und neue hinzugefügt werden. Es zeigt sich, dass das EvolvingEnsemble deutlich besser funktioniert als einfachere Ansätze.With data-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) methods impressive resultscould be achieved, e.g., in the context of gas turbine control. However, inpractice the application of RL still requires much human intervention, whichhinders the application of RL to autonomous control. This thesis addressessome of the remaining problems, particularly regarding the reliability of thepolicy generation process. The thesis first discusses RL problems with discrete state and action spaces.In that context, often an MDP is estimated from observations. It is describedhow to incorporate the estimators' uncertainties into the policy generationprocess. This information can then be used to reduce the risk of obtaining apoor policy due to flawed MDP estimates. Moreover, it is discussed how to usethe knowledge of uncertainty for efficient exploration and the assessment ofpolicy quality without requiring the policy's execution. The thesis then moves on to continuous state problems and focuses on methodsbased on fitted Q-iteration (FQI), particularly neural fitted Q-iteration(NFQ). Although NFQ has proven to be very data-efficient, it is not asreliable as required for autonomous control. The thesis proposes to useensembles to increase reliability. Several ways of ensemble usage in an NFQcontext are discussed and evaluated on a number of benchmark domains. It showsthat in all considered domains with ensembles good policies can be producedmore reliably. Next, policy assessment in continuous domains is discussed. The thesisproposes to use fitted policy evaluation (FPE), an adaptation of FQI to policyevaluation, combined with a different function approximator and/or differentdataset to obtain a measure for policy quality. Results of experiments showthat extra-tree FPE, applied to policies generated by NFQ, produces valuefunctions that can well be used to reason about the true policy quality. Finally, the thesis combines ensembles and policy assessment to derive methodsthat can deal with changing environments. The major contribution is theevolving ensemble. The policy of the evolving ensemble changes slowly as newpolicies are added and old policies removed. It turns out that the evolvingensemble approaches work considerably better than simpler approaches likesingle policies learned with recent observations or simple ensembles