We show two average-reward off-policy control algorithms, Differential Q-learning (Wan, Naik, & Sutton 2021a) and RVI Q-learning (Abounadi Bertsekas & Borkar 2001), converge in weakly communicating MDPs. Weakly communicating MDPs are the most general MDPs that can be solved by a learning algorithm with a single stream of experience. The original convergence proofs of the two algorithms require that the solution set of the average-reward optimality equation only has one degree of freedom, which is not necessarily true for weakly communicating MDPs. To the best of our knowledge, our results are the first showing average-reward off-policy control algorithms converge in weakly communicating MDPs. As a direct extension, we show that average-reward options algorithms for temporal abstraction introduced by Wan, Naik, & Sutton (2021b) converge if the Semi-MDP induced by options is weakly communicating.

近年来，已经引入了越来越多的基于模型的强化学习（RL）方法。鉴于其许多潜在的好处，例如更高的样本效率和快速适应环境变化的潜力，对基于深层模型的RL的兴趣并不奇怪。但是，我们证明，使用最近引入的本地变化适应（LOCA）设置的改进版本，众所周知的基于模型的方法（例如Planet和Dreamerv2）在适应本地环境变化的能力方面表现不佳。结合先前的工作，对其他基于模型的方法Muzero进行了类似的观察，似乎出现了一种趋势，这表明当前基于深层模型的方法具有严重的局限性。我们通过识别损害适应性行为并将其与经常在基于DEEP模型的RL中经常使用的基础技术联系起来的元素，深入研究这种绩效不佳的原因。在线性函数近似的情况下，我们通过证明了线性DyNA的修改版本实现有效适应局部变化，从而验证了这些见解。此外，我们通过实验非线性版本的DYNA来提供详细的见解，以了解构建基于自适应非线性模型方法的挑战。

我们介绍了一种简单而有效的方法，可以使用本地3D深度描述符（L3DS）同时定位和映射解决循环闭合检测。 L3DS正在采用深度学习算法从数据从数据中学到的点云提取的斑块的紧凑型表示。通过在通过其估计的相对姿势向循环候选点云登记之后计算对应于相互最近邻接描述符的点之间的度量误差，提出了一种用于循环检测的新颖重叠度量。这种新方法使我们能够在小重叠的情况下精确地检测环并估计六个自由度。我们将基于L3D的循环闭合方法与最近的LIDAR数据的方法进行比较，实现最先进的环路闭合检测精度。此外，我们嵌入了我们在最近的基于边缘的SLAM系统中的循环闭合方法，并对现实世界RGBD-TUM和合成ICL数据集进行了评估。与其原始环路闭合策略相比，我们的方法能够实现更好的本地化准确性。

We explore value-based solutions for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks in the centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) regime popularized recently. However, VDN and QMIX are representative examples that use the idea of factorization of the joint actionvalue function into individual ones for decentralized execution. VDN and QMIX address only a fraction of factorizable MARL tasks due to their structural constraint in factorization such as additivity and monotonicity. In this paper, we propose a new factorization method for MARL, QTRAN, which is free from such structural constraints and takes on a new approach to transforming the original joint action-value function into an easily factorizable one, with the same optimal actions. QTRAN guarantees more general factorization than VDN or QMIX, thus covering a much wider class of MARL tasks than does previous methods. Our experiments for the tasks of multi-domain Gaussian-squeeze and modified predator-prey demonstrate QTRAN's superior performance with especially larger margins in games whose payoffs penalize non-cooperative behavior more aggressively.

In this paper we explore the task of modeling (semi) structured object sequences; in particular we focus our attention on the problem of developing a structure-aware input representation for such sequences. In such sequences, we assume that each structured object is represented by a set of key-value pairs which encode the attributes of the structured object. Given a universe of keys, a sequence of structured objects can then be viewed as an evolution of the values for each key, over time. We encode and construct a sequential representation using the values for a particular key (Temporal Value Modeling - TVM) and then self-attend over the set of key-conditioned value sequences to a create a representation of the structured object sequence (Key Aggregation - KA). We pre-train and fine-tune the two components independently and present an innovative training schedule that interleaves the training of both modules with shared attention heads. We find that this iterative two part-training results in better performance than a unified network with hierarchical encoding as well as over, other methods that use a {\em record-view} representation of the sequence \cite{de2021transformers4rec} or a simple {\em flattened} representation of the sequence. We conduct experiments using real-world data to demonstrate the advantage of interleaving TVM-KA on multiple tasks and detailed ablation studies motivating our modeling choices. We find that our approach performs better than flattening sequence objects and also allows us to operate on significantly larger sequences than existing methods.

Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, recent research generally focuses on short-distance applications (i.e., phone unlocking) while lacking consideration of long-distance scenes (i.e., surveillance security checks). In order to promote relevant research and fill this gap in the community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask) dataset captured under 40 surveillance scenes, which has 101 subjects from different age groups with 232 3D attacks (high-fidelity masks), 200 2D attacks (posters, portraits, and screens), and 2 adversarial attacks. In this scene, low image resolution and noise interference are new challenges faced in surveillance FAS. Together with the SuHiFiMask dataset, we propose a Contrastive Quality-Invariance Learning (CQIL) network to alleviate the performance degradation caused by image quality from three aspects: (1) An Image Quality Variable module (IQV) is introduced to recover image information associated with discrimination by combining the super-resolution network. (2) Using generated sample pairs to simulate quality variance distributions to help contrastive learning strategies obtain robust feature representation under quality variation. (3) A Separate Quality Network (SQN) is designed to learn discriminative features independent of image quality. Finally, a large number of experiments verify the quality of the SuHiFiMask dataset and the superiority of the proposed CQIL.

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

Unlike traditional distributed machine learning, federated learning stores data locally for training and then aggregates the models on the server, which solves the data security problem that may arise in traditional distributed machine learning. However, during the training process, the transmission of model parameters can impose a significant load on the network bandwidth. It has been pointed out that the vast majority of model parameters are redundant during model parameter transmission. In this paper, we explore the data distribution law of selected partial model parameters on this basis, and propose a deep hierarchical quantization compression algorithm, which further compresses the model and reduces the network load brought by data transmission through the hierarchical quantization of model parameters. And we adopt a dynamic sampling strategy for the selection of clients to accelerate the convergence of the model. Experimental results on different public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

In the new era of personalization, learning the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) becomes an inevitable trend with numerous applications. Yet, most existing HTE estimation methods focus on independently and identically distributed observations and cannot handle the non-stationarity and temporal dependency in the common panel data setting. The treatment evaluators developed for panel data, on the other hand, typically ignore the individualized information. To fill the gap, in this paper, we initialize the study of HTE estimation in panel data. Under different assumptions for HTE identifiability, we propose the corresponding heterogeneous one-side and two-side synthetic learner, namely H1SL and H2SL, by leveraging the state-of-the-art HTE estimator for non-panel data and generalizing the synthetic control method that allows flexible data generating process. We establish the convergence rates of the proposed estimators. The superior performance of the proposed methods over existing ones is demonstrated by extensive numerical studies.

Latent factor model estimation typically relies on either using domain knowledge to manually pick several observed covariates as factor proxies, or purely conducting multivariate analysis such as principal component analysis. However, the former approach may suffer from the bias while the latter can not incorporate additional information. We propose to bridge these two approaches while allowing the number of factor proxies to diverge, and hence make the latent factor model estimation robust, flexible, and statistically more accurate. As a bonus, the number of factors is also allowed to grow. At the heart of our method is a penalized reduced rank regression to combine information. To further deal with heavy-tailed data, a computationally attractive penalized robust reduced rank regression method is proposed. We establish faster rates of convergence compared with the benchmark. Extensive simulations and real examples are used to illustrate the advantages.