How to optimally dispatch orders to vehicles and how to trade off between immediate and future returns are fundamental questions for a typical ride-hailing platform. We model ride-hailing as a large-scale parallel ranking problem and study the joint decision-making the task of order dispatching and fleet management in online ride-hailing platforms. This task brings unique challenges in the four aspects. First, to facilitate a huge number of vehicles to act and learn efficiently and robustly, we treat each region cell as an agent and build a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework. Second, to coordinate the agents to achieve long-term benefits, we leverage the geographical hierarchy of the region grids to perform hierarchical reinforcement learning. Third, to deal with the heterogeneous and variant action space for joint order dispatching and fleet management, we design the action as the ranking weight vector to rank and select the specific order or the fleet management destination in a unified formulation. Fourth, to achieve the multi-scale ride-hailing platform, we conduct the decision-making process in a hierarchical way where multi-head attention mechanism is utilized to incorporate the impacts of neighbor agents and capture the key agent in each scale. The whole novel framework is named as CoRide. Extensive experiments based on multiple cities real-world data as well as analytic synthetic data demonstrate that CoRide provides superior performance in terms of platform revenue and user experience in the task of city-wide hybrid order dispatching and fleet management over strong baselines. This work provides not only a solution for current online ride-hailing platforms, but also an advanced artificial intelligent technique for future life especially when large scale unmanned ground vehicles going into service.
The options framework @cite_42 @cite_9 @cite_21 formulates the problem with a two-level hierarchy, where the low-level - option - is a sub-policy with a termination condition. Since traditional options framework suffers from prior knowledge on designing options, jointly learning high-level policy with low-level policy has been proposed by @cite_13 . However, this actor-critic HRL approach needs to either learning sub-policies for each time step or one sub-policy for the whole episode. Therefore, the performance of the whole module often prone to learning useful sub-policies. To guarantee gaining effective sub-policies, one alternative direction is to provide auxiliary rewards for low-level policy: hand-designed rewards based on prior domain knowledge @cite_29 @cite_31 or mutual information @cite_16 @cite_2 @cite_23 . Given having access to one well-designed and suitable reward is often a luxury, proposed FeUdal Networks (FuN), where a generic reward is utilized for low-level policy learning, thus avoid designing hand-craft rewards. Several works extend and improve FuN with off-policy training @cite_3 , form of hindsight @cite_39 and representation learning @cite_25 .
@cite_29 @cite_9 @cite_42 @cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_31 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_25
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Building systems that autonomously create temporal abstractions from data is a key challenge in scaling learning and planning in reinforcement learning. One popular approach for addressing this challenge is the options framework (, 2000). However, only recently in (, 2017) was a policy gradient theorem derived for online learning of general purpose options in an end to end fashion. In this work, we extend previous work on this topic that only focuses on learning a two-level hierarchy including options and primitive actions to enable learning simultaneously at multiple resolutions in time. We achieve this by considering an arbitrarily deep hierarchy of options where high level temporally extended options are composed of lower level options with finer resolutions in time. We extend results from (, 2017) and derive policy gradient theorems for a deep hierarchy of options. Our proposed hierarchical option-critic architecture is capable of learning internal policies, termination conditions, and hierarchical compositions over options without the need for any intrinsic rewards or subgoals. Our empirical results in both discrete and continuous environments demonstrate the efficiency of our framework. In experimenting with off-policy temporal difference (TD) methods in hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) systems, we have observed unwanted on-policy learning under reproducible conditions. Here we present modifications to several TD methods that prevent unintentional on-policy learning from occurring. These modifications create a tension between exploration and learning. Traditional TD methods require commitment to finishing subtasks without exploration in order to update Q-values for early actions with high probability. One-step intra-option learning and temporal second difference traces (TSDT) do not suffer from this limitation. We demonstrate that our HRL system is efficient without commitment to completion of subtasks in a cliff-walking domain, contrary to a widespread claim in the literature that it is critical for efficiency of learning. Furthermore, decreasing commitment as exploration progresses is shown to improve both online performance and the resultant policy in the taxicab domain, opening a new avenue for research into when it is more beneficial to continue with the current subtask or to replan. In the pursuit of increasingly intelligent learning systems, abstraction plays a vital role in enabling sophisticated decisions to be made in complex environments. The options framework provides formalism for such abstraction over sequences of decisions. However most models require that options be given a priori, presumably specified by hand, which is neither efficient, nor scalable. Indeed, it is preferable to learn options directly from interaction with the environment. Despite several efforts, this remains a difficult problem: many approaches require access to a model of the environmental dynamics, and inferred options are often not interpretable, which limits our ability to explain the system behavior for verification or debugging purposes. In this work we develop a novel policy gradient method for the automatic learning of policies with options. This algorithm uses inference methods to simultaneously improve all of the options available to an agent, and thus can be employed in an off-policy manner, without observing option labels. Experimental results show that the options learned can be interpreted. Further, we find that the method presented here is more sample efficient than existing methods, leading to faster and more stable learning of policies with options. Learning, planning, and representing knowledge at multiple levels of temporal ab- straction are key, longstanding challenges for AI. In this paper we consider how these challenges can be addressed within the mathematical framework of reinforce- ment learning and Markov decision processes (MDPs). We extend the usual notion of action in this framework to include options—closed-loop policies for taking ac- tion over a period of time. Examples of options include picking up an object, going to lunch, and traveling to a distant city, as well as primitive actions such as mus- cle twitches and joint torques. Overall, we show that options enable temporally abstract knowledge and action to be included in the reinforcement learning frame- work in a natural and general way. In particular, we show that options may be used interchangeably with primitive actions in planning methods such as dynamic pro- gramming and in learning methods such as Q-learning. Formally, a set of options defined over an MDP constitutes a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP), and the theory of SMDPs provides the foundation for the theory of options. However, the most interesting issues concern the interplay between the underlying MDP and the SMDP and are thus beyond SMDP theory. We present results for three such cases: 1) we show that the results of planning with options can be used during execution to interrupt options and thereby perform even better than planned, 2) we introduce new intra-option methods that are able to learn about an option from fragments of its execution, and 3) we propose a notion of subgoal that can be used to improve the options themselves. All of these results have precursors in the existing literature; the contribution of this paper is to establish them in a simpler and more general setting with fewer changes to the existing reinforcement learning framework. In particular, we show that these results can be obtained without committing to (or ruling out) any particular approach to state abstraction, hierarchy, function approximation, or the macro-utility problem.