Performance Evaluation ofMulti-Agent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning(MARL)has proven to be successful in cooperative assignments.MARL is used to investigate how autonomous agents with the same interests can connect and act in one team.MARL cooperation scenarios are explored in recreational cooperative augmented reality environments,as well as realworld scenarios in robotics.In this paper,we explore the realm of MARL and its potential applications in cooperative assignments.Our focus is on developing a multi-agent system that can collaborate to attack or defend against enemies and achieve victory withminimal damage.To accomplish this,we utilize the StarCraftMulti-Agent Challenge(SMAC)environment and train four MARL algorithms:Q-learning with Mixtures of Experts(QMIX),Value-DecompositionNetwork(VDN),Multi-agent Proximal PolicyOptimizer(MAPPO),andMulti-Agent Actor Attention Critic(MAA2C).These algorithms allow multiple agents to cooperate in a specific scenario to achieve the targeted mission.Our results show that the QMIX algorithm outperforms the other three algorithms in the attacking scenario,while the VDN algorithm achieves the best results in the defending scenario.Specifically,the VDNalgorithmreaches the highest value of battle wonmean and the lowest value of dead alliesmean.Our research demonstrates the potential forMARL algorithms to be used in real-world applications,such as controllingmultiple robots to provide helpful services or coordinating teams of agents to accomplish tasks that would be impossible for a human to do.The SMAC environment provides a unique opportunity to test and evaluate MARL algorithms in a challenging and dynamic environment,and our results show that these algorithms can be used to achieve victory with minimal damage.

AI Safety Approach for Minimizing Collisions in Autonomous Navigation

Autonomous agents can explore the environment around them when equipped with advanced hardware and software systems that help intelligent agents minimize collisions.These systems are developed under the term Artificial Intelligence(AI)safety.AI safety is essential to provide reliable service to consumers in various fields such asmilitary,education,healthcare,and automotive.This paper presents the design of an AI safety algorithmfor safe autonomous navigation using Reinforcement Learning(RL).Machine Learning Agents Toolkit(ML-Agents)was used to train the agentwith a proximal policy optimizer algorithmwith an intrinsic curiositymodule(PPO+ICM).This training aims to improve AI safety and minimize or prevent any mistakes that can cause dangerous collisions by the intelligent agent.Four experiments have been executed to validate the results of our research.The designed algorithmwas tested in a virtual environment with four differentmodels.A comparison was presented in four cases to identify the best-performing model for improvingAI safety.The designed algorithmenabled the intelligent agent to perform the required task safely using RL.A goal collision ratio of 64%was achieved,and the collision incidents were minimized from 134 to 52 in the virtual environment within 30min.

Multiple Data Augmentation Strategy for Enhancing the Performance of YOLOv7 Object Detection Algorithm

The object detection technique depends on various methods for duplicating the dataset without adding more images.Data augmentation is a popularmethod that assists deep neural networks in achieving better generalization performance and can be seen as a type of implicit regularization.Thismethod is recommended in the casewhere the amount of high-quality data is limited,and gaining new examples is costly and time-consuming.In this paper,we trained YOLOv7 with a dataset that is part of the Open Images dataset that has 8,600 images with four classes(Car,Bus,Motorcycle,and Person).We used five different data augmentations techniques for duplicates and improvement of our dataset.The performance of the object detection algorithm was compared when using the proposed augmented dataset with a combination of two and three types of data augmentation with the result of the original data.The evaluation result for the augmented data gives a promising result for every object,and every kind of data augmentation gives a different improvement.The mAP@.5 of all classes was 76%,and F1-score was 74%.The proposed method increased the mAP@.5 value by+13%and F1-score by+10%for all objects.

Implementation of Strangely Behaving Intelligent Agents to Determine Human Intervention During Reinforcement Learning

Intrinsic motivation helps autonomous exploring agents traverse a larger portion of their environments.However,simulations of different learning environments in previous research show that after millions of timesteps of successful training,an intrinsically motivated agent may learn to act in ways unintended by the designer.This potential for unintended actions of autonomous exploring agents poses threats to the environment and humans if operated in the real world.We investigated this topic by using Unity’s MachineLearningAgent Toolkit(ML-Agents)implementation of the Proximal Policy Optimization(PPO)algorithm with the Intrinsic Curiosity Module(ICM)to train autonomous exploring agents in three learning environments.We demonstrate that ICM,although designed to assist agent navigation in environments with sparse reward generation,increasing gradually as a tool for purposely training misbehaving agent in significantly less than 1 million timesteps.We present the following achievements:1)experiments designed to cause agents to act undesirably,2)a metric for gauging how well an agent achieves its goal without collisions,and 3)validation of PPO best practices.Then,we used optimized methods to improve the agent’s performance and reduce collisions within the same environments.These achievements help further our understanding of the significance of monitoring training statistics during reinforcement learning for determining how humans can intervene to improve agent safety and performance.