Data processing and analytics are fundamental and pervasive. Algorithms play a vital role in data processing and analytics where many algorithm designs have incorporated heuristics and general rules from human knowledge and experience to improve their effectiveness. Recently, reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in particular, is increasingly explored and exploited in many areas because it can learn better strategies in complicated environments it is interacting with than statically designed algorithms. Motivated by this trend, we provide a comprehensive review of recent works focusing on utilizing DRL to improve data processing and analytics. First, we present an introduction to key concepts, theories, and methods in DRL. Next, we discuss DRL deployment on database systems, facilitating data processing and analytics in various aspects, including data organization, scheduling, tuning, and indexing. Then, we survey the application of DRL in data processing and analytics, ranging from data preparation, natural language processing to healthcare, fintech, etc. Finally, we discuss important open challenges and future research directions of using DRL in data processing and analytics.
Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) algorithms, such as proximal policy optimization (PPO), trust region policy optimization, and their variations, have become the dominant reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms because of their ease of implementation and good practical performance. This dissertation is concerned with theoretical justification and practical application of the APG algorithms for solving processing network control optimization problems. Processing network control problems are typically formulated as Markov decision process (MDP) or semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) problems t…
Fine tuning distributed systems is considered to be a craftsmanship, relying on intuition and experience. This becomes even more challenging when the systems need to react in near real time, as streaming engines have to do to maintain pre-agreed service quality metrics. In this article, we present an automated approach that builds on a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning methods to recommend the most appropriate lever configurations based on previous load. With this, streaming engines can be automatically tuned without requiring a human to determine the right way and proper ti…
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens（雅典国立卡波迪斯特里安大学）；University of Piraeus（比雷埃夫斯大学）
We apply post-processing to the class probability distribution outputs of audio event classification models and employ reinforcement learning to jointly discover the optimal parameters for various stages of a post-processing stack, such as the classification thresholds and the kernel sizes of median filtering algorithms used to smooth out model predictions. To achieve this we define a reinforcement learning environment where: 1) a state is the class probability distribution provided by the model for a given audio sample, 2) an action is the choice of a candidate optimal value for each paramete…
This paper tackles a new problem setting: reinforcement learning with pixel-wise rewards (pixelRL) for image processing. After the introduction of the deep Q-network, deep RL has been achieving great success. However, the applications of deep RL for image processing are still limited. Therefore, we extend deep RL to pixelRL for various image processing applications. In pixelRL, each pixel has an agent, and the agent changes the pixel value by taking an action. We also propose an effective learning method for pixelRL that significantly improves the performance by considering not only the future…
Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM（弗劳恩霍夫力学研究所）
A major goal of materials design is to find material structures with desired properties and in a second step to find a processing path to reach one of these structures. In this paper, we propose and investigate a deep reinforcement learning approach for the optimization of processing paths. The goal is to find optimal processing paths in the material structure space that lead to target-structures, which have been identified beforehand to result in desired material properties. There exists a target set containing one or multiple different structures. Our proposed methods can find an optimal pat…
Many studies have proposed methods for optimizing the dialogue performance of an entire pipeline task-oriented dialogue system by jointly training modules in the system using reinforcement learning. However, these methods are limited in that they can only be applied to modules implemented using trainable neural-based methods. To solve this problem, we propose a method for optimizing a pipeline system composed of modules implemented with arbitrary methods for dialogue performance. With our method, neural-based components called post-processing networks (PPNs) are installed inside such a system …
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）
Learned indices have been proposed to replace classic index structures like B-Tree with machine learning (ML) models. They require to replace both the indices and query processing algorithms currently deployed by the databases, and such a radical departure is likely to encounter challenges and obstacles. In contrast, we propose a fundamentally different way of using ML techniques to improve on the query performance of the classic R-Tree without the need of changing its structure or query processing algorithms. Specifically, we develop reinforcement learning (RL) based models to decide how to c…
Citadel（城堡投资）；New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
This paper considers the problem of resource allocation in stream processing, where continuous data flows must be processed in real time in a large distributed system. To maximize system throughput, the resource allocation strategy that partitions the computation tasks of a stream processing graph onto computing devices must simultaneously balance workload distribution and minimize communication. Since this problem of graph partitioning is known to be NP-complete yet crucial to practical streaming systems, many heuristic-based algorithms have been developed to find reasonably good solutions. I…
Switchable Lightweight Anti-symmetric Processing (SLAP) with CNN Outspeeds Data Augmentation by Smaller Sample -- Application in Gomoku Reinforcement Learning
We present a hybrid industrial cooling system model that embeds analytical solutions within a multi-physics simulation. This model is designed for reinforcement learning (RL) applications and balances simplicity with simulation fidelity and interpretability. The model's fidelity is evaluated against real world data from a large scale cooling system. This is followed by a case study illustrating how the model can be used for RL research. For this, we develop an industrial task suite that allows specifying different problem settings and levels of complexity, and use it to evaluate the performanc…
Advances in deep vision techniques and ubiquity of smart cameras will drive the next generation of video analytics. However, video analytics applications consume vast amounts of energy as both deep learning techniques and cameras are power-hungry. In this paper, we focus on a parking video analytics platform and propose RL-CamSleep, a deep reinforcement learning-based technique, to actuate the cameras to reduce the energy footprint while retaining the system's utility. Our key insight is that many video-analytics applications do not always need to be operational, and we can design policies to …
Centre of Electronics, Optoelectronics and Telecommunications (CEOT), University of Algarve（阿尔加维大学电子、光电子与电信中心）；Aberystwyth University（阿伯里斯特威斯大学）；Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Algarve（阿尔加维大学科技学院）
Event processing is the cornerstone of the dynamic and responsive Internet of Things (IoT). Recent approaches in this area are based on representational state transfer (REST) principles, which allow event processing tasks to be placed at any device that follows the same principles. However, the tasks should be properly distributed among edge devices to ensure fair resources utilization and guarantee seamless execution. This article investigates the use of deep learning to fairly distribute the tasks. An attention-based neural network model is proposed to generate efficient load balancing solut…
Tokyo University of Science（东京理科大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
This paper tackles a new problem setting: reinforcement learning with pixel-wise rewards (pixelRL) for image processing. After the introduction of the deep Q-network, deep RL has been achieving great success. However, the applications of deep reinforcement learning (RL) for image processing are still limited. Therefore, we extend deep RL to pixelRL for various image processing applications. In pixelRL, each pixel has an agent, and the agent changes the pixel value by taking an action. We also propose an effective learning method for pixelRL that significantly improves the performance by consid…
Trinity College Dublin（都柏林大学三一学院）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
Wireless networks used for Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to largely involve cloud-based computing and processing. Softwarised and centralised signal processing and network switching in the cloud enables flexible network control and management. In a cloud environment, dynamic computational resource allocation is essential to save energy while maintaining the performance of the processes. The stochastic features of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) load variation as well as the possible complex parallelisation situations of the cloud processes makes the dynamic resource allocation an int…
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Microsoft（微软）
Federated learning (FL) is a training technique that enables client devices to jointly learn a shared model by aggregating locally-computed models without exposing their raw data. While most of the existing work focuses on improving the FL model accuracy, in this paper, we focus on the improving the training efficiency, which is often a hurdle for adopting FL in real-world applications. Specifically, we design an efficient FL framework which jointly optimizes model accuracy, processing latency and communication efficiency, all of which are primary design considerations for real implementation …
This paper tackles the problem of learning a questioner in the goal-oriented visual dialog task. Several previous works adopt model-free reinforcement learning. Most pretrain the model from a finite set of human-generated data. We argue that using limited demonstrations to kick-start the questioner is insufficient due to the large policy search space. Inspired by a recently proposed information theoretic approach, we develop two analytic experts to serve as a source of high-quality demonstrations for imitation learning. We then take advantage of reinforcement learning to refine the model towar…
We present Simion Zoo, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) workbench that provides a complete set of tools to design, run, and analyze the results,both statistically and visually, of RL control applications. The main features that set apart Simion Zoo from similar software packages are its easy-to-use GUI, its support for distributed execution including deployment over graphics processing units (GPUs) , and the possibility to explore concurrently the RL metaparameter space, which is key to successful RL experimentation.
In this paper, we focus on general-purpose Distributed Stream Data Processing Systems (DSDPSs), which deal with processing of unbounded streams of continuous data at scale distributedly in real or near-real time. A fundamental problem in a DSDPS is the scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing average end-to-end tuple processing time. A widely-used solution is to distribute workload evenly over machines in the cluster in a round-robin manner, which is obviously not efficient due to lack of consideration for communication delay. Model-based approaches do not work well either due to th…
Traffic control using intelligent timing of traffic lights with reinforcement learning technique and real-time processing of surveillance camera images
ASTRON, The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy（荷兰射电天文研究所（ASTRON））
Model based reinforcement learning has proven to be more sample efficient than model free methods. On the other hand, the construction of a dynamics model in model based reinforcement learning has increased complexity. Data processing tasks in radio astronomy are such situations where the original problem which is being solved by reinforcement learning itself is the creation of a model. Fortunately, many methods based on heuristics or signal processing do exist to perform the same tasks and we can leverage them to propose the best action to take, or in other words, to provide a `hint'. We prop…
Recent times have witnessed sharp improvements in reinforcement learning tasks using deep reinforcement learning techniques like Deep Q Networks, Policy Gradients, Actor Critic methods which are based on deep learning based models and back-propagation of gradients to train such models. An active area of research in reinforcement learning is about training agents to play complex video games, which so far has been something accomplished only by human intelligence. Some state of the art performances in video game playing using deep reinforcement learning are obtained by processing the sequence of…
University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）
The emergence of new wireless technologies together with the requirement of massive connectivity results in several technical issues such as excessive interference, high computational demand for signal processing, and lengthy processing delays. In this work, we propose several beamforming techniques for an uplink cell-free network with centralized, semi-distributed, and fully distributed processing, all based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). First, we propose a fully centralized beamforming method that uses the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DDPG) with continuous space. We …
In this paper, we consider the recent trend of evaluating progress on reinforcement learning technology by using text-based environments and games as evaluation environments. This reliance on text brings advances in natural language processing into the ambit of these agents, with a recurring thread being the use of external knowledge to mimic and better human-level performance. We present one such instantiation of agents that use commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet to show promising performance on two text-based environments.
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Mila；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）
Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a more general and flexible parametric framework for reinforcement learning that extends standard Q-learning to a two-stream model for processing positive and negative rewards, and allows to incorporate a wide range of reward-processing biases -- an important component of human decision making which can help us better understand a wide spectrum of multi-agent interactions in complex real-world socioeconomic systems, as well as various neuropsychiatric conditions associated with disruptions in normal reward…
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
The performance of a trained object detection neural network depends a lot on the image quality. Generally, images are pre-processed before feeding them into the neural network and domain knowledge about the image dataset is used to choose the pre-processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm called ObjectRL to choose the amount of a particular pre-processing to be applied to improve the object detection performances of pre-trained networks. The main motivation for ObjectRL is that an image which looks good to a human eye may not necessarily be the optimal one for a pre-train…
National University of Ireland, Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）
In recent years, a specific machine learning method called deep learning has gained huge attraction, as it has obtained astonishing results in broad applications such as pattern recognition, speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Recent research has also been shown that deep learning techniques can be combined with reinforcement learning methods to learn useful representations for the problems with high dimensional raw data input. This chapter reviews the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning with a focus on the most used deep architectures such as autoe…
Although deep reinforcement learning (RL) has recently enjoyed many successes, its methods are still data inefficient, which makes solving numerous problems prohibitively expensive in terms of data. We aim to remedy this by taking advantage of the rich supervisory signal in unlabeled data for learning state representations. This thesis introduces three different representation learning algorithms that have access to different subsets of the data sources that traditional RL algorithms use: (i) GRICA is inspired by independent component analysis (ICA) and trains a deep neural network to output s…
Universidade Federal de Santa Maria（圣玛丽亚联邦大学）；Universidade Federal de Rio Grande（里奥格兰德联邦大学）；Universidad Tecnológica del Uruguay（乌拉圭技术大学）
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has produced great achievements since it was proposed, including the possibility of processing raw vision input data. However, training an agent to perform tasks based on image feedback remains a challenge. It requires the processing of large amounts of data from high-dimensional observation spaces, frame by frame, and the agent's actions are computed according to deep neural network policies, end-to-end. Image pre-processing is an effective way of reducing these high dimensional spaces, eliminating unnecessary information present in the scene, supporting the …
Although most reinforcement learning research has centered on competitive games, little work has been done on applying it to co-operative multiplayer games or text-based games. Codenames is a board game that involves both asymmetric co-operation and natural language processing, which makes it an excellent candidate for advancing RL research. To my knowledge, this work is the first to formulate Codenames as a Markov Decision Process and apply some well-known reinforcement learning algorithms such as SAC, PPO, and A2C to the environment. Although none of the above algorithms converge for the Cod…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
This article reviews recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms for large-scale control systems and communication networks, which learn to communicate and cooperate. We provide an overview of this emerging field, with an emphasis on the decentralized setting under different coordination protocols. We highlight the evolution of reinforcement learning algorithms from single-agent to multi-agent systems, from a distributed optimization perspective, and conclude with future directions and challenges, in the hope to catalyze the growing synergy among distributed optimization, …
With the impact of real-time processing being realized in the recent past, the need for efficient implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms has been on the rise. Albeit the numerous advantages of Bellman equations utilized in RL algorithms, they are not without the large search space of design parameters. This research aims to shed light on the design space exploration associated with reinforcement learning parameters, specifically that of Policy Iteration. Given the large computational expenses of fine-tuning the parameters of reinforcement learning algorithms, we propose an auto-t…
Emotions are intimately tied to motivation and the adaptation of behavior, and many animal species show evidence of emotions in their behavior. Therefore, emotions must be related to powerful mechanisms that aid survival, and, emotions must be evolutionary continuous phenomena. How and why did emotions evolve in nature, how do events get emotionally appraised, how do emotions relate to cognitive complexity, and, how do they impact behavior and learning? In this article I propose that all emotions are manifestations of reward processing, in particular Temporal Difference (TD) error assessment. …
School of Electrical Engineering KAIST（韩国科学技术院电气工程学院）
In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning platform named FIXAR which employs fixed-point data types and arithmetic units for the first time using a SW/HW co-design approach. Starting from 32-bit fixed-point data, Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) reduces its data precision based on the range of activations and performs retraining to minimize the reward degradation. FIXAR proposes the adaptive array processing core composed of configurable processing elements to support both intra-layer parallelism and intra-batch parallelism for high-throughput inference and training. Finally, FI…
AI Lab of SoftBank Robotics Europe (Aldebaran)（软银机器人欧洲公司人工智能实验室（Aldebaran））
Autonomous robots need to be able to adapt to unforeseen situations and to acquire new skills through trial and error. Reinforcement learning in principle offers a suitable methodological framework for this kind of autonomous learning. However current computational reinforcement learning agents mostly learn each individual skill entirely from scratch. How can we enable artificial agents, such as robots, to acquire some form of generic knowledge, which they could leverage for the learning of new skills? This paper argues that, like the brain, the cognitive system of artificial agents has to dev…
Bi-directional personalization reinforcement learning-based architecture with active learning using a multi-model data service for the travel nursing industry
Beyond On-Policy Exploration: Integrating External Policy Rollouts for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Language Models
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（首尔大学人工智能交叉项目）；Artificial Intelligence Institute, Seoul National University（首尔大学人工智能研究院）；Department of Intelligence and Information, Seoul National University（首尔大学智能与信息系）
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
In recent years, fully differentiable rigid body physics simulators have been developed, which can be used to simulate a wide range of robotic systems. In the context of reinforcement learning for control, these simulators theoretically allow algorithms to be applied directly to analytic gradients of the reward function. However, to date, these gradients have proved extremely challenging to use, and are outclassed by algorithms using no gradient information at all. In this work we present a novel algorithm, cross entropy analytic policy gradients, that is able to leverage these gradients to ou…
