Zhi Wang

Yuanyang Zhu, Zhi Wang, Yuanheng Zhu et al.

For on-policy reinforcement learning, discretizing action space for continuous control can easily express multiple modes and is straightforward to optimize. However, without considering the inherent ordering between the discrete atomic actions, the explosion in the number of discrete actions can possess undesired properties and induce a higher variance for the policy gradient estimator. In this paper, we introduce a straightforward architecture that addresses this issue by constraining the discrete policy to be unimodal using Poisson probability distributions. This unimodal architecture can better leverage the continuity in the underlying continuous action space using explicit unimodal probability distributions. We conduct extensive experiments to show that the discrete policy with the unimodal probability distribution provides significantly faster convergence and higher performance for on-policy reinforcement learning algorithms in challenging control tasks, especially in highly complex tasks such as Humanoid. We provide theoretical analysis on the variance of the policy gradient estimator, which suggests that our attentively designed unimodal discrete policy can retain a lower variance and yield a stable learning process.

Hongyu Ding, Yuanze Tang, Qing Wu et al.

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is an interesting extension of the traditional RL framework, where the dynamic environment and reward sparsity can cause conventional learning algorithms to fail. Reward shaping is a practical approach to improving sample efficiency by embedding human domain knowledge into the learning process. Existing reward shaping methods for goal-conditioned RL are typically built on distance metrics with a linear and isotropic distribution, which may fail to provide sufficient information about the ever-changing environment with high complexity. This paper proposes a novel magnetic field-based reward shaping (MFRS) method for goal-conditioned RL tasks with dynamic target and obstacles. Inspired by the physical properties of magnets, we consider the target and obstacles as permanent magnets and establish the reward function according to the intensity values of the magnetic field generated by these magnets. The nonlinear and anisotropic distribution of the magnetic field intensity can provide more accessible and conducive information about the optimization landscape, thus introducing a more sophisticated magnetic reward compared to the distance-based setting. Further, we transform our magnetic reward to the form of potential-based reward shaping by learning a secondary potential function concurrently to ensure the optimal policy invariance of our method. Experiments results in both simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that MFRS outperforms relevant existing methods and effectively improves the sample efficiency of RL algorithms in goal-conditioned tasks with various dynamics of the target and obstacles.

Xueshuo Xie, Zhi Wang, Xuhang Xiao et al.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is becoming an attack target of advanced persistent threat (APT). Currently, IIoT logs have not been effectively used for anomaly detection. In this paper, we use blockchain to prevent logs from being tampered with and propose a pvalue-guided anomaly detection approach. This approach uses statistical pvalues to combine multiple heterogeneous log parser algorithms. The weighted edit distance is selected as a score function to calculate the nonconformity score between a log and a predefined event. The pvalue is calculated based on the non-conformity scores which indicate how well a log matches an event. This approach is tested on a large number of real-world HDFS logs and IIoT logs. The experiment results show that abnormal events could be effectively recognized by our pvalue-guided approach.