Automata guided hierarchical reinforcement learning for zero-shot skill composition

An obstacle that prevents the wide adoption of (deep) reinforcement learning (RL) in control systems is its need for a large amount of interactions with the environment in order to master a skill. The learned skill usually generalizes poorly across domains and re-training is often necessary when presented with a new task. We present a framework that combines methods in formal methods with hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL). The set of techniques we provide allows for convenient specification of tasks with complex logic, learn hierarchical policies (meta-controller and low-level controllers) with well-defined intrinsic rewards using any RL methods and is able to construct new skills from existing ones without additional learning. We evaluate the proposed methods in a simple grid world simulation as well as simulation on a Baxter robot

Enhanced quantum teleportation in the background of Schwarzschild spacetime by weak measurements

It is commonly believed that the fidelity of quantum teleportation in the gravitational field would be degraded due to the heat up by the Hawking radiation. In this paper, we point out that the Hawking effect could be eliminated by the combined action of pre- and post-weak measurements, and thus the teleportation fidelity is almost completely protected. It is intriguing to notice that the enhancement of fidelity could not be attributed to the improvement of entanglement, but rather to the probabilistic nature of weak measurements. Our work extends the ability of weak measurements as a quantum technique to battle against gravitational decoherence in relativistic quantum information.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, comments are welcom

Achievable Sum Rates of Half- and Full-Duplex Bidirectional OFDM Communication Links

While full-duplex (FD) transmission has the potential to double the system capacity, its substantial benefit can be offset by the self-interference (SI) and non-ideality of practical transceivers. In this paper, we investigate the achievable sum rates (ASRs) of half-duplex (HD) and FD transmissions with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), where the non-ideality is taken into consideration. Four transmission strategies are considered, namely HD with uniform power allocation (UPA), HD with non-UPA (NUPA), FD with UPA, and FD with NUPA. For each of the four transmission strategies, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize its ASR, and a (suboptimal/optimal) solution with low complexity is accordingly derived. Performance evaluations and comparisons are conducted for three typical channels, namely symmetric frequency-flat/selective and asymmetric frequency-selective channels. Results show that the proposed solutions for both HD and FD transmissions can achieve near optimal performances. For FD transmissions, the optimal solution can be obtained under typical conditions. In addition, several observations are made on the ASR performances of HD and FD transmissions.Comment: To appear in IEEE TVT. This paper solves the problem of sum achievable rate optimization of bidirectional FD OFDM link, where joint time and power allocation is involve

Enhancing teleportation of quantum Fisher information by partial measurements

The purport of quantum teleportation is to completely transfer information from one party to another distant partner. However, from the perspective of parameter estimation, it is the information carried by a particular parameter, not the information of total quantum state that needs to be teleported. Due to the inevitable noise in environment, we propose two schemes to enhance quantum Fisher information (QFI) teleportation under amplitude damping noise with the technique of partial measurements. We find that post partial measurement can greatly enhance the teleported QFI, while the combination of prior partial measurement and post partial measurement reversal could completely eliminate the effect of decoherence. We show that, somewhat consequentially, enhancing QFI teleportation is more economic than that of improving fidelity teleportation. Our work extends the ability of partial measurements as a quantum technique to battle decoherence in quantum information processing.Comment: Revised version, minor changes, accepted by Phys. Rev.