Deep Reinforcement Learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Assisted Vehicular Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to complement the 5G communication infrastructure in future smart cities. Hot spots easily appear in road intersections, where effective communication among vehicles is challenging. UAVs may serve as relays with the advantages of low price, easy deployment, line-of-sight links, and flexible mobility. In this paper, we study a UAV-assisted vehicular network where the UAV jointly adjusts its transmission power and bandwidth allocation under 3D flight to maximize the total throughput. First, we formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem by modeling the mobility of the UAV/vehicles and the state transitions. Secondly, we solve the target problem using a deep reinforcement learning method, namely, the deep deterministic policy gradient, and propose three solutions with different control objectives. Then we extend the proposed solutions by considering the energy consumption of 3D flight. Thirdly, in a simplified model with small state space and action space, we verify the optimality of proposed algorithms. Comparing with two baseline schemes, we demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms in a realistic model.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Assisted Vehicular Networks in Smart Cities

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to complement the 5G communication infrastructure in future smart cities. Hot spots easily appear in road intersections, where effective communication among vehicles is challenging. UAVs may serve as relays with the advantages of low price, easy deployment, line-of-sight links, and flexible mobility. In this paper, we study a UAV-assisted vehicular network where the UAV jointly adjusts its transmission power and bandwidth allocation under 3D flight to maximize the total throughput. First, we formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem by modeling the mobility of the UAV/vehicles and the state transitions. Secondly, we solve the target problem using a deep reinforcement learning method, namely, the deep deterministic policy gradient, and propose three solutions with different control objectives. Then we extend the proposed solutions considering of the energy consumption of 3D flight. Thirdly, in a simplified model with small state space and action space, we verify the optimality of proposed algorithms. Comparing with two baseline schemes, we demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms in a realistic model.

TGAN: Deep Tensor Generative Adversarial Nets for Large Image Generation

Deep generative models have been successfully applied to many applications. However, existing works experience limitations when generating large images (the literature usually generates small images, e.g. 32 * 32 or 128 * 128). In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, called deep tensor adversarial generative nets (TGAN), that generates large high-quality images by exploring tensor structures. Essentially, the adversarial process of TGAN takes place in a tensor space. First, we impose tensor structures for concise image representation, which is superior in capturing the pixel proximity information and the spatial patterns of elementary objects in images, over the vectorization preprocess in existing works. Secondly, we propose TGAN that integrates deep convolutional generative adversarial networks and tensor super-resolution in a cascading manner, to generate high-quality images from random distributions. More specifically, we design a tensor super-resolution process that consists of tensor dictionary learning and tensor coefficients learning. Finally, on three datasets, the proposed TGAN generates images with more realistic textures, compared with state-of-the-art adversarial autoencoders. The size of the generated images is increased by over 8.5 times, namely 374 * 374 in PASCAL2.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) are envisioned to play a critical role in improving traffic flow and reducing congestion, which is a pervasive issue impacting urban areas around the globe. Rapidly advancing vehicular communication and edge cloud computation technologies provide key enablers for smart traffic management. However, operating viable real-time actuation mechanisms on a practically relevant scale involves formidable challenges, e.g., policy iteration and conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques suffer from poor scalability due to state space explosion. Motivated by these issues, we explore the potential for Deep Q-Networks (DQN) to optimize traffic light control policies. As an initial benchmark, we establish that the DQN algorithms yield the "thresholding" policy in a single-intersection. Next, we examine the scalability properties of DQN algorithms and their performance in a linear network topology with several intersections along a main artery. We demonstrate that DQN algorithms produce intelligent behavior, such as the emergence of "greenwave" patterns, reflecting their ability to learn favorable traffic light actuations.

Practical Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Stock Trading

Stock trading strategy plays a crucial role in investment companies. However, it is challenging to obtain optimal strategy in the complex and dynamic stock market. We explore the potential of deep reinforcement learning to optimize stock trading strategy and thus maximize investment return. 30 stocks are selected as our trading stocks and their daily prices are used as the training and trading market environment. We train a deep reinforcement learning agent and obtain an adaptive trading strategy. The agent's performance is evaluated and compared with Dow Jones Industrial Average and the traditional min-variance portfolio allocation strategy. The proposed deep reinforcement learning approach is shown to outperform the two baselines in terms of both the Sharpe ratio and cumulative returns.

Transform-Based Multilinear Dynamical System for Tensor Time Series Analysis

We propose a novel multilinear dynamical system (MLDS) in a transform domain, named $\mathcal{L}$-MLDS, to model tensor time series. With transformations applied to a tensor data, the latent multidimensional correlations among the frontal slices are built, and thus resulting in the computational independence in the transform domain. This allows the exact separability of the multi-dimensional problem into multiple smaller LDS problems. To estimate the system parameters, we utilize the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to determine the parameters of each LDS. Further, $\mathcal{L}$-MLDSs significantly reduce the model parameters and allows parallel processing. Our general $\mathcal{L}$-MLDS model is implemented based on different transforms: discrete Fourier transform, discrete cosine transform and discrete wavelet transform. Due to the nonlinearity of these transformations, $\mathcal{L}$-MLDS is able to capture the nonlinear correlations within the data unlike the MLDS \cite{rogers2013multilinear} which assumes multi-way linear correlations. Using four real datasets, the proposed $\mathcal{L}$-MLDS is shown to achieve much higher prediction accuracy than the state-of-the-art MLDS and LDS with an equal number of parameters under different noise models. In particular, the relative errors are reduced by $50\% \sim 99\%$. Simultaneously, $\mathcal{L}$-MLDS achieves an exponential improvement in the model's training time than MLDS.

Information Scaling Law of Deep Neural Networks

With the rapid development of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), various network models that show strong computing power and impressive expressive power are proposed. However, there is no comprehensive informational interpretation of DNNs from the perspective of information theory. Due to the nonlinear function and the uncertain number of layers and neural units used in the DNNs, the network structure shows nonlinearity and complexity. With the typical DNNs named Convolutional Arithmetic Circuits (ConvACs), the complex DNNs can be converted into mathematical formula. Thus, we can use rigorous mathematical theory especially the information theory to analyse the complicated DNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel information scaling law scheme that can interpret the network's inner organization by information theory. First, we show the informational interpretation of the activation function. Secondly, we prove that the information entropy increases when the information is transmitted through the ConvACs. Finally, we propose the information scaling law of ConvACs through making a reasonable assumption.