K-nearest Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Collaborative Tasks with a Variable Number of Agents

Traditionally, the performance of multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms are demonstrated and validated in gaming environments where we often have a fixed number of agents. In many industrial applications, the number of available agents can change at any given day and even when the number of agents is known ahead of time, it is common for an agent to break during the operation and become unavailable for a period of time. In this paper, we propose a new deep reinforcement learning algorithm for multi-agent collaborative tasks with a variable number of agents. We demonstrate the application of our algorithm using a fleet management simulator developed by Hitachi to generate realistic scenarios in a production site.

An Offline Deep Reinforcement Learning for Maintenance Decision-Making

Several machine learning and deep learning frameworks have been proposed to solve remaining useful life estimation and failure prediction problems in recent years. Having access to the remaining useful life estimation or likelihood of failure in near future helps operators to assess the operating conditions and, therefore, provides better opportunities for sound repair and maintenance decisions. However, many operators believe remaining useful life estimation and failure prediction solutions are incomplete answers to the maintenance challenge. They argue that knowing the likelihood of failure in the future is not enough to make maintenance decisions that minimize costs and keep the operators safe. In this paper, we present a maintenance framework based on offline supervised deep reinforcement learning that instead of providing information such as likelihood of failure, suggests actions such as "continuation of the operation" or "the visitation of the repair shop" to the operators in order to maximize the overall profit. Using offline reinforcement learning makes it possible to learn the optimum maintenance policy from historical data without relying on expensive simulators. We demonstrate the application of our solution in a case study using the NASA C-MAPSS dataset.

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Adjustments

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn complex policies to optimize agent operation over time. RL algorithms have shown promising results in solving complicated problems in recent years. However, their application on real-world physical systems remains limited. Despite the advancements in RL algorithms, the industries often prefer traditional control strategies. Traditional methods are simple, computationally efficient and easy to adjust. In this paper, we first propose a new Q-learning algorithm for continuous action space, which can bridge the control and RL algorithms and bring us the best of both worlds. Our method can learn complex policies to achieve long-term goals and at the same time it can be easily adjusted to address short-term requirements without retraining. Next, we present an approximation of our algorithm which can be applied to address short-term requirements of any pre-trained RL algorithm. The case studies demonstrate that both our proposed method as well as its practical approximation can achieve short-term and long-term goals without complex reward functions.

FESTA: Flow Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Attention for Scene Point Clouds

Scene flow depicts the dynamics of a 3D scene, which is critical for various applications such as autonomous driving, robot navigation, AR/VR, etc. Conventionally, scene flow is estimated from dense/regular RGB video frames. With the development of depth-sensing technologies, precise 3D measurements are available via point clouds which have sparked new research in 3D scene flow. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to extract scene flow from point clouds due to the sparsity and irregularity in typical point cloud sampling patterns. One major issue related to irregular sampling is identified as the randomness during point set abstraction/feature extraction -- an elementary process in many flow estimation scenarios. A novel Spatial Abstraction with Attention (SA^2) layer is accordingly proposed to alleviate the unstable abstraction problem. Moreover, a Temporal Abstraction with Attention (TA^2) layer is proposed to rectify attention in temporal domain, leading to benefits with motions scaled in a larger range. Extensive analysis and experiments verified the motivation and significant performance gains of our method, dubbed as Flow Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Attention (FESTA), when compared to several state-of-the-art benchmarks of scene flow estimation.

A Non-linear Function-on-Function Model for Regression with Time Series Data

In the last few decades, building regression models for non-scalar variables, including time series, text, image, and video, has attracted increasing interests of researchers from the data analytic community. In this paper, we focus on a multivariate time series regression problem. Specifically, we aim to learn mathematical mappings from multiple chronologically measured numerical variables within a certain time interval S to multiple numerical variables of interest over time interval T. Prior arts, including the multivariate regression model, the Seq2Seq model, and the functional linear models, suffer from several limitations. The first two types of models can only handle regularly observed time series. Besides, the conventional multivariate regression models tend to be biased and inefficient, as they are incapable of encoding the temporal dependencies among observations from the same time series. The sequential learning models explicitly use the same set of parameters along time, which has negative impacts on accuracy. The function-on-function linear model in functional data analysis (a branch of statistics) is insufficient to capture complex correlations among the considered time series and suffer from underfitting easily. In this paper, we propose a general functional mapping that embraces the function-on-function linear model as a special case. We then propose a non-linear function-on-function model using the fully connected neural network to learn the mapping from data, which addresses the aforementioned concerns in the existing approaches. For the proposed model, we describe in detail the corresponding numerical implementation procedures. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through the application to two real-world problems.

Challenges of Applying Deep Reinforcement Learning in Dynamic Dispatching

Dynamic dispatching aims to smartly allocate the right resources to the right place at the right time. Dynamic dispatching is one of the core problems for operations optimization in the mining industry. Theoretically, deep reinforcement learning (RL) should be a natural fit to solve this problem. However, the industry relies on heuristics or even human intuitions, which are often short-sighted and sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we review the main challenges in using deep RL to address the dynamic dispatching problem in the mining industry.

Spatio-Temporal Functional Neural Networks

Explosive growth in spatio-temporal data and its wide range of applications have attracted increasing interests of researchers in the statistical and machine learning fields. The spatio-temporal regression problem is of paramount importance from both the methodology development and real-world application perspectives. Given the observed spatially encoded time series covariates and real-valued response data samples, the goal of spatio-temporal regression is to leverage the temporal and spatial dependencies to build a mapping from covariates to response with minimized prediction error. Prior arts, including the convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (CovLSTM) and variations of the functional linear models, cannot learn the spatio-temporal information in a simple and efficient format for proper model building. In this work, we propose two novel extensions of the Functional Neural Network (FNN), a temporal regression model whose effectiveness and superior performance over alternative sequential models have been proven by many researchers. The effectiveness of the proposed spatio-temporal FNNs in handling varying spatial correlations is demonstrated in comprehensive simulation studies. The proposed models are then deployed to solve a practical and challenging precipitation prediction problem in the meteorology field.

Health Indicator Forecasting for Improving Remaining Useful Life Estimation

Prognostics is concerned with predicting the future health of the equipment and any potential failures. With the advances in the Internet of Things (IoT), data-driven approaches for prognostics that leverage the power of machine learning models are gaining popularity. One of the most important categories of data-driven approaches relies on a predefined or learned health indicator to characterize the equipment condition up to the present time and make inference on how it is likely to evolve in the future. In these approaches, health indicator forecasting that constructs the health indicator curve over the lifespan using partially observed measurements (i.e., health indicator values within an initial period) plays a key role. Existing health indicator forecasting algorithms, such as the functional Empirical Bayesian approach, the regression-based formulation, a naive scenario matching based on the nearest neighbor, have certain limitations. In this paper, we propose a new `generative + scenario matching' algorithm for health indicator forecasting. The key idea behind the proposed approach is to first non-parametrically fit the underlying health indicator curve with a continuous Gaussian Process using a sample of run-to-failure health indicator curves. The proposed approach then generates a rich set of random curves from the learned distribution, attempting to obtain all possible variations of the target health condition evolution process over the system's lifespan. The health indicator extrapolation for a piece of functioning equipment is inferred as the generated curve that has the highest matching level within the observed period. Our experimental results show the superiority of our algorithm over the other state-of-the-art methods.

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation in 3D Graph-Structured Point Clouds of Wild Scenes

The deficiency of 3D segmentation labels is one of the main obstacles to effective point cloud segmentation, especially for scenes in the wild with varieties of different objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel deep graph convolutional network-based framework for large-scale semantic scene segmentation in point clouds with sole 2D supervision. Different with numerous preceding multi-view supervised approaches focusing on single object point clouds, we argue that 2D supervision is capable of providing sufficient guidance information for training 3D semantic segmentation models of natural scene point clouds while not explicitly capturing their inherent structures, even with only single view per training sample. Specifically, a Graph-based Pyramid Feature Network (GPFN) is designed to implicitly infer both global and local features of point sets and an Observability Network (OBSNet) is introduced to further solve object occlusion problem caused by complicated spatial relations of objects in 3D scenes. During the projection process, perspective rendering and semantic fusion modules are proposed to provide refined 2D supervision signals for training along with a 2D-3D joint optimization strategy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our 2D supervised framework, which achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art approaches trained with full 3D labels, for semantic point cloud segmentation on the popular SUNCG synthetic dataset and S3DIS real-world dataset.

Regularized Operating Envelope with Interpretability and Implementability Constraints

Operating envelope is an important concept in industrial operations. Accurate identification for operating envelope can be extremely beneficial to stakeholders as it provides a set of operational parameters that optimizes some key performance indicators (KPI) such as product quality, operational safety, equipment efficiency, environmental impact, etc. Given the importance, data-driven approaches for computing the operating envelope are gaining popularity. These approaches typically use classifiers such as support vector machines, to set the operating envelope by learning the boundary in the operational parameter spaces between the manually assigned `large KPI' and `small KPI' groups. One challenge to these approaches is that the assignment to these groups is often ad-hoc and hence arbitrary. However, a bigger challenge with these approaches is that they don't take into account two key features that are needed to operationalize operating envelopes: (i) interpretability of the envelope by the operator and (ii) implementability of the envelope from a practical standpoint. In this work, we propose a new definition for operating envelope which directly targets the expected magnitude of KPI (i.e., no need to arbitrarily bin the data instances into groups) and accounts for the interpretability and the implementability. We then propose a regularized `GA + penalty' algorithm that outputs an envelope where the user can tradeoff between bias and variance. The validity of our proposed algorithm is demonstrated by two sets of simulation studies and an application to a real-world challenge in the mining processes of a flotation plant.