22,880 research outputs found
Multiscale Markov Decision Problems: Compression, Solution, and Transfer Learning
Many problems in sequential decision making and stochastic control often have
natural multiscale structure: sub-tasks are assembled together to accomplish
complex goals. Systematically inferring and leveraging hierarchical structure,
particularly beyond a single level of abstraction, has remained a longstanding
challenge. We describe a fast multiscale procedure for repeatedly compressing,
or homogenizing, Markov decision processes (MDPs), wherein a hierarchy of
sub-problems at different scales is automatically determined. Coarsened MDPs
are themselves independent, deterministic MDPs, and may be solved using
existing algorithms. The multiscale representation delivered by this procedure
decouples sub-tasks from each other and can lead to substantial improvements in
convergence rates both locally within sub-problems and globally across
sub-problems, yielding significant computational savings. A second fundamental
aspect of this work is that these multiscale decompositions yield new transfer
opportunities across different problems, where solutions of sub-tasks at
different levels of the hierarchy may be amenable to transfer to new problems.
Localized transfer of policies and potential operators at arbitrary scales is
emphasized. Finally, we demonstrate compression and transfer in a collection of
illustrative domains, including examples involving discrete and continuous
statespaces.Comment: 86 pages, 15 figure
Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview
In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to
reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable
environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization
can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level
(micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with
other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level
(macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or
removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of
what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models,
and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page
Fast dynamic deployment adaptation for mobile devices
Mobile devices that are limited in terms of CPU power, memory or battery power are only capable of executing simple applications. To be able to run advanced applications we introduce a framework to split up the application and execute parts on a remote server. In order to dynamically adapt the deployment at runtime, techniques are presented to keep the migration time as low as possible and to prevent performance loss while migrating. Also methods are presented and evaluated to cope with applications generating a variable load, which can lead to an unstable system
TAPER: query-aware, partition-enhancement for large, heterogenous, graphs
Graph partitioning has long been seen as a viable approach to address Graph
DBMS scalability. A partitioning, however, may introduce extra query processing
latency unless it is sensitive to a specific query workload, and optimised to
minimise inter-partition traversals for that workload. Additionally, it should
also be possible to incrementally adjust the partitioning in reaction to
changes in the graph topology, the query workload, or both. Because of their
complexity, current partitioning algorithms fall short of one or both of these
requirements, as they are designed for offline use and as one-off operations.
The TAPER system aims to address both requirements, whilst leveraging existing
partitioning algorithms. TAPER takes any given initial partitioning as a
starting point, and iteratively adjusts it by swapping chosen vertices across
partitions, heuristically reducing the probability of inter-partition
traversals for a given pattern matching queries workload. Iterations are
inexpensive thanks to time and space optimisations in the underlying support
data structures. We evaluate TAPER on two different large test graphs and over
realistic query workloads. Our results indicate that, given a hash-based
partitioning, TAPER reduces the number of inter-partition traversals by around
80%; given an unweighted METIS partitioning, by around 30%. These reductions
are achieved within 8 iterations and with the additional advantage of being
workload-aware and usable online.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, unpublishe
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