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arXiv:2008.01481 · Quantum Machine Intelligence

Quantum-accessible reinforcement learning beyond strictly epochal environments

A. Hamann, Vedran Dunjko, Sabine Wölk

Published Aug 2, 2021• 12 citations
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Abstract

In recent years, quantum-enhanced machine learning has emerged as a particularly fruitful application of quantum algorithms, covering aspects of supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning offers numerous options of how quantum theory can be applied, and is arguably the least explored, from a quantum perspective. Here, an agent explores an environment and tries to find a behavior optimizing some figure of merit. Some of the first approaches investigated settings where this exploration can be sped-up, by considering quantum analogs of classical environments, which can then be queried in superposition. If the environments have a strict periodic structure in time (i.e. are strictly episodic), such environments can be effectively converted to conventional oracles encountered in quantum information. However, in general environments, we obtain scenarios that generalize standard oracle tasks. In this work, we consider one such generalization, where the environment is not strictly episodic, which is mapped to an oracle identification setting with a changing oracle. We analyze this case and show that standard amplitude-amplification techniques can, with minor modifications, still be applied to achieve quadratic speed-ups. In addition, we prove that an algorithm based on Grover iterations is optimal for oracle identification even if the oracle changes over time in a way that the "rewarded space" is monotonically increasing. This result constitutes one of the first generalizations of quantum-accessible reinforcement learning.

DOI
10.1007/s42484-021-00049-7

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In recent years, quantum-enhanced machine learning has emerged as a particularly fruitful application of quantum algorithms, covering aspects of supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning offers numerous options of how quantum theory can be applied, and is arguably the least explored, from a quantum perspective. Here, an agent explores an environment and tries to find a behavior optimizing some figure of merit. Some of the first approaches investigated settings where this exploration can be sped-up, by considering quantum analogs of classical environments, which can then be queried in superposition. If the environments have a strict periodic structure in time (i.e. are strictly episodic), such environments can be effectively converted to conventional oracles encountered in quantum information. However, in general environments, we obtain scenarios that generalize standard oracle tasks. In this work, we consider one such generalization, where the environment is not strictly episodic, which is mapped to an oracle identification setting with a changing oracle. We analyze this case and show that standard amplitude-amplification techniques can, with minor modifications, still be applied to achieve quadratic speed-ups. In addition, we prove that an algorithm based on Grover iterations is optimal for oracle identification even if the oracle changes over time in a way that the "rewarded space" is monotonically increasing. This result constitutes one of the first generalizations of quantum-accessible reinforcement learning.
Combining quantum computing techniques in the form of amplitude amplification with classical reinforcement learning has led to the so-called “hybrid agent for quantum-accessible reinforcement learning”, which achieves a quadratic speedup in sample complexity for certain learning problems. So far, this hybrid agent has only been applied to stationary learning problems, that is, learning problems without any time dependency within components of the Markov decision process. In this work, we investigate the applicability of the hybrid agent to dynamic RL environments and thus to more realistic scenarios. To this end, we enhance the hybrid agent by introducing a dissipation mechanism and, with the resulting learning agent, perform an empirical comparison with a classical RL agent in an RL environment with a time-dependent reward function. Our findings suggest that the modified hybrid agent can adapt its behavior to changes in the environment quickly, leading to a higher average success probability compared to its classical counterpart.
Quantum computers can offer dramatic improvements over classical devices for data analysis tasks such as prediction and classification. However, less is known about the advantages that quantum computers may bring in the setting of reinforcement learning, where learning is achieved via interaction with a task environment. Here, we consider a special case of reinforcement learning, where the task environment allows quantum access. In addition, we impose certain "naturalness" conditions on the task environment, which rule out the kinds of oracle problems that are studied in quantum query complexity (and for which quantum speedups are well-known). Within this framework of quantum-accessible reinforcement learning environments, we demonstrate that quantum agents can achieve exponential improvements in learning efficiency, surpassing previous results that showed only quadratic improvements. A key step in the proof is to construct task environments that encode well-known oracle problems, such as Simon's problem and Recursive Fourier Sampling, while satisfying the above "naturalness" conditions for reinforcement learning. Our results suggest that quantum agents may perform well in certain game-playing scenarios, where the game has recursive structure, and the agent can learn by playing against itself.
Abstract In the last decade quantum machine learning has provided fascinating and fundamental improvements to supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning (RL). In RL, a so-called agent is challenged to solve a task given by some environment. The agent learns to solve the task by exploring the environment and exploiting the rewards it gets from the environment. For some classical task environments, an analogue quantum environment can be constructed which allows to find rewards quadratically faster by applying quantum algorithms. In this paper, we analytically analyze the behavior of a hybrid agent which combines this quadratic speedup in exploration with the policy update of a classical agent. This leads to a faster learning of the hybrid agent compared to the classical agent. We demonstrate that if the classical agent needs on average ⟨J⟩ rewards and ⟨T⟩cl epochs to learn how to solve the task, the hybrid agent will take ⟨ T ⟩ q ⩽ α s α o ⟨ T ⟩ c l ⟨ J ⟩ epochs on average. Here, α s and α o denote constants depending on details of the quantum search and are independent of the problem size. Additionally, we prove that if the environment allows for maximally α o k max sequential coherent interactions, e.g. due to noise effects, an improvement given by ⟨T⟩q ≈ α o ⟨T⟩cl/(4k max) is still possible.
Recent work on quantum machine learning has demonstrated that quantum computers can offer dramatic improvements over classical devices for data mining, prediction and classification. However, less is known about the advantages using quantum computers may bring in the more general setting of reinforcement learning, where learning is achieved via interaction with a task environment that provides occasional rewards. Reinforcement learning can incorporate data-analysis-oriented learning settings as special cases, but also includes more complex situations where, e.g., reinforcing feedback is delayed. In a few recent works, Grover-type amplification has been utilized to construct quantum agents that achieve up-to-quadratic improvements in learning efficiency. These encouraging results have left open the key question of whether super-polynomial improvements in learning times are possible for genuine reinforcement learning problems, that is problems that go beyond the other more restricted learning paradigms. In this work, we provide a family of such genuine reinforcement learning tasks. We construct quantum-enhanced learners which learn super-polynomially, and even exponentially faster than any classical reinforcement learning model, and we discuss the potential impact our results may have on future technologies.
Understanding the power and limitations of quantum access to data in machine learning tasks is primordial to assess the potential of quantum computing in artificial intelligence. Previous works have already shown that speed-ups in learning are possible when given quantum access to reinforcement learning environments. Yet, the applicability of quantum algorithms in this setting remains very limited, notably in environments with large state and action spaces. In this work, we design quantum algorithms to train state-of-the-art reinforcement learning policies by exploiting quantum interactions with an environment. However, these algorithms only offer full quadratic speed-ups in sample complexity over their classical analogs when the trained policies satisfy some regularity conditions. Interestingly, we find that reinforcement learning policies derived from parametrized quantum circuits are well-behaved with respect to these conditions, which showcases the benefit of a fully-quantum reinforcement learning framework.
Reinforcement learning is a subfield of machine learning that studies how an agent interacts with an environment in order to extract as large a reward as possible. A standard approach to study such interaction is through Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and the task of choosing an optimal policy --- a function that tells the agent which action to take. In this work, we study two types of MDPs --- finite-horizon and infinite-horizon discounted --- and propose new quantum algorithms for computing approximate optimal policies. Our quantum algorithms are based on a new combination of standard value iteration and quantum subroutines like quantum mean estimation and quantum maximum finding, overall enhanced with techniques from sample-optimal classical algorithms. Our resulting query complexities improve upon previous works, thus approaching already established quantum lower bounds.