4,251 research outputs found
The age of information in gossip networks
We introduce models of gossip based communication networks in which each node
is simultaneously a sensor, a relay and a user of information. We model the
status of ages of information between nodes as a discrete time Markov chain. In
this setting a gossip transmission policy is a decision made at each node
regarding what type of information to relay at any given time (if any). When
transmission policies are based on random decisions, we are able to analyze the
age of information in certain illustrative structured examples either by means
of an explicit analysis, an algorithm or asymptotic approximations. Our key
contribution is presenting this class of models.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure
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
Performance Guarantees for Homomorphisms Beyond Markov Decision Processes
Most real-world problems have huge state and/or action spaces. Therefore, a
naive application of existing tabular solution methods is not tractable on such
problems. Nonetheless, these solution methods are quite useful if an agent has
access to a relatively small state-action space homomorphism of the true
environment and near-optimal performance is guaranteed by the map. A plethora
of research is focused on the case when the homomorphism is a Markovian
representation of the underlying process. However, we show that near-optimal
performance is sometimes guaranteed even if the homomorphism is non-Markovian.
Moreover, we can aggregate significantly more states by lifting the Markovian
requirement without compromising on performance. In this work, we expand
Extreme State Aggregation (ESA) framework to joint state-action aggregations.
We also lift the policy uniformity condition for aggregation in ESA that allows
even coarser modeling of the true environment
Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a
computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers
familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a
broad selection of current work are summarized. Reinforcement learning is the
problem faced by an agent that learns behavior through trial-and-error
interactions with a dynamic environment. The work described here has a
resemblance to work in psychology, but differs considerably in the details and
in the use of the word ``reinforcement.'' The paper discusses central issues of
reinforcement learning, including trading off exploration and exploitation,
establishing the foundations of the field via Markov decision theory, learning
from delayed reinforcement, constructing empirical models to accelerate
learning, making use of generalization and hierarchy, and coping with hidden
state. It concludes with a survey of some implemented systems and an assessment
of the practical utility of current methods for reinforcement learning.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
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