Recently it has been shown that tensor networks (TNs) have the ability to represent the expected return of a single-agent finite Markov decision process (FMDP). The TN represents a distribution model, where all possible trajectories are considered. When extending these ideas to a multi-agent setting, distribution models suffer from the curse of dimensionality: the exponential relation between the number of possible trajectories and the number of agents. The key advantage of using TNs in this setting is that there exists a large number of established optimisation and decomposition techniques that are specific to TNs, that one can apply to ensure the most efficient representation is found. In this report, these methods are used to form a TN that represents the expected return of a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) task. This model is then applied to a 2 agent random walker example, where it was shown that the policy is correctly optimised using a DMRG technique. Finally, I demonstrate the use of an exact decomposition technique, reducing the number of elements in the tensors by 97.5%, without experiencing any loss of information.
Recently it has been shown that tensor networks (TNs) have the ability to represent the expected return of a single-agent finite Markov decision process (FMDP). The TN represents a distribution model, where all possible trajectories are considered. When extending these ideas to a multi-agent setting, distribution models suffer from the curse of dimensionality: the exponential relation between the number of possible trajectories and the number of agents. The key advantage of using TNs in this setting is that there exists a large number of established optimisation and decomposition techniques that are specific to TNs, that one can apply to ensure the most efficient representation is found. In this report, these methods are used to form a TN that represents the expected return of a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) task. This model is then applied to a 2 agent random walker example, where it was shown that the policy is correctly optimised using a DMRG technique. Finally, I demonstrate the use of an exact decomposition technique, reducing the number of elements in the tensors by 97.5%, without experiencing any loss of information.
Tensor network (TN) techniques - often used in the context of quantum many-body physics - have shown promise as a tool for tackling machine learning (ML) problems. The application of TNs to ML, however, has mostly focused on supervised and unsupervised learning. Yet, with their direct connection to hidden Markov chains, TNs are also naturally suited to Markov decision processes (MDPs) which provide the foundation for reinforcement learning (RL). Here we introduce a general TN formulation of finite, episodic and discrete MDPs. We show how this formulation allows us to exploit algorithms developed for TNs for policy optimisation, the key aim of RL. As an application we consider the issue - formulated as an RL problem - of finding a stochastic evolution that satisfies specific dynamical conditions, using the simple example of random walk excursions as an illustration.
Abstract Tensor networks (TNs) have seen an increase in applications in recent years. While they were originally developed to model many-body quantum systems, their usage has expanded into the field of machine learning. This work adds to the growing range of applications by focusing on planning by combining the generative modeling capabilities of matrix product states and the action selection algorithm provided by active inference. Their ability to deal with the curse of dimensionality, to represent probability distributions, and to dynamically discover hidden variables make matrix product states specifically an interesting choice to use as the generative model in active inference, which relies on ‘beliefs’ about hidden states within an environment. We evaluate our method on the T-maze and Frozen Lake environments, and show that the TN-based agent acts Bayes optimally as expected under active inference.
Probabilistic inference is a fundamental task in modern machine learning. Recent advances in tensor network (TN) contraction algorithms have enabled the development of better exact inference methods. However, many common inference tasks in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) still lack corresponding TN-based adaptations. In this paper, we advance the connection between PGMs and TNs by formulating and implementing tensor-based solutions for the following inference tasks: (A) computing the partition function, (B) computing the marginal probability of sets of variables in the model, (C) determining the most likely assignment to a set of variables, (D) the same as (C) but after having marginalized a different set of variables, and (E) generating samples from a learned probability distribution using a generalized method. Our study is motivated by recent technical advances in the fields of quantum circuit simulation, quantum many-body physics, and statistical physics. Through an experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that the integration of these quantum technologies with a series of algorithms introduced in this study significantly improves the performance efficiency of existing methods for solving probabilistic inference tasks. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We present a framework to integrate tensor network (TN) methods with reinforcement learning (RL) for solving dynamical optimization tasks. We consider the RL actor-critic method, a model-free approach for solving RL problems, and introduce TNs as the approximators for its policy and value functions. Our "actor-critic with tensor networks" (ACTeN) method is especially well suited to problems with large and factorizable state and action spaces. As an illustration of the applicability of ACTeN we solve the exponentially hard task of sampling rare trajectories in two paradigmatic stochastic models, the East model of glasses and the asymmetric simple exclusion process, the latter being particularly challenging to other methods due to the absence of detailed balance. With substantial potential for further integration with the vast array of existing RL methods, the approach introduced here is promising both for applications in physics and to multi-agent RL problems more generally.
Tensor decomposition techniques have shown great successes in machine learning and data science by extending classical algorithms based on matrix factorization to multi-modal and multi-way data. However, there exist many tensor decomposition models~(CP, Tucker, Tensor Train, etc.) and the rank of such a decomposition is typically a collection of integers rather than a unique number, making model and hyper-parameter selection a tedious and costly task. At the same time, tensor network methods are powerful tools developed in the physics community which have recently shown their potential for machine learning applications and offer a unifying view of the various tensor decomposition models. In this paper, we leverage the tensor network formalism to develop a generic and efficient adaptive algorithm for tensor learning. Our method is based on a simple greedy approach optimizing a differentiable loss function starting from a rank one tensor and successively identifying the most promising tensor network edges for small rank increments. Our algorithm can adaptively identify tensor network structures with small number of parameters that effectively optimize the objective function from data. The framework we introduce is very broad and encompasses many common tensor optimization problems. Experiments on tensor decomposition and tensor completion tasks with both synthetic and real world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Many problems in computational neuroscience, neuroinformatics, pattern/image recognition, signal processing and machine learning generate massive amounts of multidimensional data with multiple aspects and high dimensionality. Tensors (i.e., multi-way arrays) provide often a natural and compact representation for such massive multidimensional data via suitable low-rank approximations. Big data analytics require novel technologies to efficiently process huge datasets within tolerable elapsed times. Such a new emerging technology for multidimensional big data is a multiway analysis via tensor networks (TNs) and tensor decompositions (TDs) which represent tensors by sets of factor (component) matrices and lower-order (core) tensors. Dynamic tensor analysis allows us to discover meaningful hidden structures of complex data and to perform generalizations by capturing multi-linear and multi-aspect relationships. We will discuss some fundamental TN models, their mathematical and graphical descriptions and associated learning algorithms for large-scale TDs and TNs, with many potential applications including: Anomaly detection, feature extraction, classification, cluster analysis, data fusion and integration, pattern recognition, predictive modeling, regression, time series analysis and multiway component analysis. Keywords: Large-scale HOSVD, Tensor decompositions, CPD, Tucker models, Hierarchical Tucker (HT) decomposition, low-rank tensor approximations (LRA), Tensorization/Quantization, tensor train (TT/QTT) - Matrix Product States (MPS), Matrix Product Operator (MPO), DMRG, Strong Kronecker Product (SKP).