35,875 research outputs found
Nonlinear Quantum Evolution Equations to Model Irreversible Adiabatic Relaxation with Maximal Entropy Production and Other Nonunitary Processes
We first discuss the geometrical construction and the main mathematical
features of the maximum-entropy-production/steepest-entropy-ascent nonlinear
evolution equation proposed long ago by this author in the framework of a fully
quantum theory of irreversibility and thermodynamics for a single isolated or
adiabatic particle, qubit, or qudit, and recently rediscovered by other
authors. The nonlinear equation generates a dynamical group, not just a
semigroup, providing a deterministic description of irreversible conservative
relaxation towards equilibrium from any non-equilibrium density operator. It
satisfies a very restrictive stability requirement equivalent to the
Hatsopoulos-Keenan statement of the second law of thermodynamics. We then
examine the form of the evolution equation we proposed to describe multipartite
isolated or adiabatic systems. This hinges on novel nonlinear projections
defining local operators that we interpret as ``local perceptions'' of the
overall system's energy and entropy. Each component particle contributes an
independent local tendency along the direction of steepest increase of the
locally perceived entropy at constant locally perceived energy. It conserves
both the locally-perceived energies and the overall energy, and meets strong
separability and non-signaling conditions, even though the local evolutions are
not independent of existing correlations. We finally show how the geometrical
construction can readily lead to other thermodynamically relevant models, such
as of the nonunitary isoentropic evolution needed for full extraction of a
system's adiabatic availability.Comment: To appear in Reports on Mathematical Physics. Presented at the The
Jubilee 40th Symposium on Mathematical Physics, "Geometry & Quanta", Torun,
Poland, June 25-28, 200
Using entropy-based local weighting to improve similarity assessment
This paper enhances and analyses the power of local weighted similarity measures. The paper proposes a new entropy-based local weighting algorithm to be used in similarity assessment to improve the performance of the CBR retrieval task. It has been carried out a comparative analysis of the performance of unweighted similarity measures, global weighted similarity measures, and local weighting similarity measures. The testing has been done using several similarity measures, and some data sets from the UCI Machine Learning Database Repository and other environmental databases.Postprint (published version
Fairness Is an Emergent Self-Organized Property of the Free Market for Labor
The excessive compensation packages of CEOs of U.S. corporations in recent
years have brought to the foreground the issue of fairness in economics. The
conventional wisdom is that the free market for labor, which determines the pay
packages, cares only about efficiency and not fairness. We present an
alternative theory that shows that an ideal free market environment also
promotes fairness, as an emergent property resulting from the self-organizing
market dynamics. Even though an individual employee may care only about his or
her salary and no one else's, the collective actions of all the employees,
combined with the profit maximizing actions of all the companies, in a free
market environment under budgetary constraints, lead towards a more fair
allocation of wages, guided by Adam Smith's invisible hand of
self-organization. By exploring deep connections with statistical
thermodynamics, we show that entropy is the appropriate measure of fairness in
a free market environment which is maximized at equilibrium to yield the
lognormal distribution of salaries as the fairest inequality of pay in an
organization under ideal conditions
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Towards Informed Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning
In this thesis, we discuss various techniques for improving exploration for deep reinforcement learning. We begin with a brief review of reinforcement learning (RL) and the fundamental v.s. exploitation trade-off. Then we review how deep RL has improved upon classical and summarize six categories of the latest exploration methods for deep RL, in the order increasing usage of prior information. We then explore representative works in three categories discuss their strengths and weaknesses. The first category, represented by Soft Q-learning, uses regularization to encourage exploration. The second category, represented by count-based via hashing, maps states to hash codes for counting and assigns higher exploration to less-encountered states. The third category utilizes hierarchy and is represented by modular architecture for RL agents to play StarCraft II. Finally, we conclude that exploration by prior knowledge is a promising research direction and suggest topics of potentially impact
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