Constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of RL whose objective is to find an optimal policy that maximizes expected cumulative return while satisfying a given constraint. Most of the previous constrained RL works consider expected cumulative sum cost as the constraint. However, optimization with this constraint cannot guarantee a target probability of outage event that the cumulative sum cost exceeds a given threshold. This paper proposes a framework, named Quantile Constrained RL (QCRL), to constrain the quantile of the distribution of the cumulative sum cost that is a necessary and sufficient condition to satisfy the outage constraint. This is the first work that tackles the issue of applying the policy gradient theorem to the quantile and provides theoretical results for approximating the gradient of the quantile. Based on the derived theoretical results and the technique of the Lagrange multiplier, we construct a constrained RL algorithm named Quantile Constrained Policy Optimization (QCPO). We use distributional RL with the Large Deviation Principle (LDP) to estimate quantiles and tail probability of the cumulative sum cost for the implementation of QCPO. The implemented algorithm satisfies the outage probability constraint after the training period.

在本文中，我们认为合作的多代理强化学习（MARL）具有稀疏的奖励。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种名为Maser：MARL的新方法，并具有从经验重播缓冲区产生的子目标。在广泛使用的集中式培训的假设下，通过分散执行和对MARL的Q值分解的一致性，Maser通过考虑单个Q值和总Q值来自动为多个代理人生成适当的子目标。然后，Maser根据与Q学习相关的可行表示为每个代理设计个人固有奖励，以便代理人达到其子目标，同时最大化联合行动值。数值结果表明，与其他最先进的MARL算法相比，Maser的表现明显优于Starcraft II微管理基准。

在本文中，我们提出了一个健壮的模仿学习（IL）框架，该框架在扰动环境动态时改善了IL的稳健性。在单个环境中训练的现有IL框架可能会因环境动力学的扰动而灾难性地失败，因为它无法捕获可以更改潜在环境动态的情况。我们的框架有效地处理了具有不同动态的环境，通过模仿了采样环境动力学中的多个专家，以增强环境动力学的一般变化中的鲁棒性。为了强力模仿多个样本专家，我们将代理商政策与每个样本专家之间的Jensen-Shannon分歧降低了风险。数值结果表明，与常规IL基准相比，我们的算法显着提高了针对动力学扰动的鲁棒性。

According to the rapid development of drone technologies, drones are widely used in many applications including military domains. In this paper, a novel situation-aware DRL- based autonomous nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm in cyber-physical loitering munition applications. On the battlefield, the design of DRL-based autonomous control algorithm is not straightforward because real-world data gathering is generally not available. Therefore, the approach in this paper is that cyber-physical virtual environment is constructed with Unity environment. Based on the virtual cyber-physical battlefield scenarios, a DRL-based automated nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm can be designed, evaluated, and visualized. Moreover, many obstacles exist which is harmful for linear trajectory control in real-world battlefield scenarios. Thus, our proposed autonomous nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm utilizes situation-aware components those are implemented with a Raycast function in Unity virtual scenarios. Based on the gathered situation-aware information, the drone can autonomously and nonlinearly adjust its trajectory during flight. Therefore, this approach is obviously beneficial for avoiding obstacles in obstacle-deployed battlefields. Our visualization-based performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm is superior from the other linear mobility control algorithms.

Supervision for metric learning has long been given in the form of equivalence between human-labeled classes. Although this type of supervision has been a basis of metric learning for decades, we argue that it hinders further advances of the field. In this regard, we propose a new regularization method, dubbed HIER, to discover the latent semantic hierarchy of training data, and to deploy the hierarchy to provide richer and more fine-grained supervision than inter-class separability induced by common metric learning losses. HIER achieved this goal with no annotation for the semantic hierarchy but by learning hierarchical proxies in hyperbolic spaces. The hierarchical proxies are learnable parameters, and each of them is trained to serve as an ancestor of a group of data or other proxies to approximate the semantic hierarchy among them. HIER deals with the proxies along with data in hyperbolic space since geometric properties of the space are well-suited to represent their hierarchical structure. The efficacy of HIER was evaluated on four standard benchmarks, where it consistently improved performance of conventional methods when integrated with them, and consequently achieved the best records, surpassing even the existing hyperbolic metric learning technique, in almost all settings.

Steering language generation towards objectives or away from undesired content has been a long-standing goal in utilizing language models (LM). Recent work has demonstrated reinforcement learning and weighted decoding as effective approaches to achieve a higher level of language control and quality with pros and cons. In this work, we propose a novel critic decoding method for controlled language generation (CriticControl) that combines the strengths of reinforcement learning and weighted decoding. Specifically, we adopt the actor-critic framework to train an LM-steering critic from non-differentiable reward models. And similar to weighted decoding, our method freezes the language model and manipulates the output token distribution using called critic, improving training efficiency and stability. Evaluation of our method on three controlled generation tasks, namely topic control, sentiment control, and detoxification, shows that our approach generates more coherent and well-controlled texts than previous methods. In addition, CriticControl demonstrates superior generalization ability in zero-shot settings. Human evaluation studies also corroborate our findings.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are mainly based on the slot-filling-based TOD (SF-TOD) framework, in which dialogues are broken down into smaller, controllable units (i.e., slots) to fulfill a specific task. A series of approaches based on this framework achieved remarkable success on various TOD benchmarks. However, we argue that the current TOD benchmarks are limited to surrogate real-world scenarios and that the current TOD models are still a long way from unraveling the scenarios. In this position paper, we first identify current status and limitations of SF-TOD systems. After that, we explore the WebTOD framework, the alternative direction for building a scalable TOD system when a web/mobile interface is available. In WebTOD, the dialogue system learns how to understand the web/mobile interface that the human agent interacts with, powered by a large-scale language model.

Estimating the 6D pose of objects is one of the major fields in 3D computer vision. Since the promising outcomes from instance-level pose estimation, the research trends are heading towards category-level pose estimation for more practical application scenarios. However, unlike well-established instance-level pose datasets, available category-level datasets lack annotation quality and provided pose quantity. We propose the new category level 6D pose dataset HouseCat6D featuring 1) Multi-modality of Polarimetric RGB+P and Depth, 2) Highly diverse 194 objects of 10 household object categories including 2 photometrically challenging categories, 3) High-quality pose annotation with an error range of only 1.35 mm to 1.74 mm, 4) 41 large scale scenes with extensive viewpoint coverage, 5) Checkerboard-free environment throughout the entire scene. We also provide benchmark results of state-of-the-art category-level pose estimation networks.

Recent studies have proposed a unified user modeling framework that leverages user behavior data from various applications. Most benefit from utilizing users' behavior sequences as plain texts, representing rich information in any domain or system without losing generality. Hence, a question arises: Can language modeling for user history corpus help improve recommender systems? While its versatile usability has been widely investigated in many domains, its applications to recommender systems still remain underexplored. We show that language modeling applied directly to task-specific user histories achieves excellent results on diverse recommendation tasks. Also, leveraging additional task-agnostic user histories delivers significant performance benefits. We further demonstrate that our approach can provide promising transfer learning capabilities for a broad spectrum of real-world recommender systems, even on unseen domains and services.

While witnessing the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era and beyond, quantum federated learning (QFL) has recently become an emerging field of study. In QFL, each quantum computer or device locally trains its quantum neural network (QNN) with trainable gates, and communicates only these gate parameters over classical channels, without costly quantum communications. Towards enabling QFL under various channel conditions, in this article we develop a depth-controllable architecture of entangled slimmable quantum neural networks (eSQNNs), and propose an entangled slimmable QFL (eSQFL) that communicates the superposition-coded parameters of eS-QNNs. Compared to the existing depth-fixed QNNs, training the depth-controllable eSQNN architecture is more challenging due to high entanglement entropy and inter-depth interference, which are mitigated by introducing entanglement controlled universal (CU) gates and an inplace fidelity distillation (IPFD) regularizer penalizing inter-depth quantum state differences, respectively. Furthermore, we optimize the superposition coding power allocation by deriving and minimizing the convergence bound of eSQFL. In an image classification task, extensive simulations corroborate the effectiveness of eSQFL in terms of prediction accuracy, fidelity, and entropy compared to Vanilla QFL as well as under different channel conditions and various data distributions.