Curricular Subgoals for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to reconstruct the reward function from expert demonstrations to facilitate policy learning, and has demonstrated its remarkable success in imitation learning. To promote expert-like behavior, existing IRL methods mainly focus on learning global reward functions to minimize the trajectory difference between the imitator and the expert. However, these global designs are still limited by the redundant noise and error propagation problems, leading to the unsuitable reward assignment and thus downgrading the agent capability in complex multi-stage tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Curricular Subgoal-based Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CSIRL) framework, that explicitly disentangles one task with several local subgoals to guide agent imitation. Specifically, CSIRL firstly introduces decision uncertainty of the trained agent over expert trajectories to dynamically select subgoals, which directly determines the exploration boundary of different task stages. To further acquire local reward functions for each stage, we customize a meta-imitation objective based on these curricular subgoals to train an intrinsic reward generator. Experiments on the D4RL and autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed methods yields results superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts, as well as better interpretability. Our code is available at https://github.com/Plankson/CSIRL.

Neural network state estimation for full quantum state tomography

An efficient state estimation model, neural network estimation (NNE), empowered by machine learning techniques, is presented for full quantum state tomography (FQST). A parameterized function based on neural network is applied to map the measurement outcomes to the estimated quantum states. Parameters are updated with supervised learning procedures. From the computational complexity perspective our algorithm is the most efficient one among existing state estimation algorithms for full quantum state tomography. We perform numerical tests to prove both the accuracy and scalability of our model.