Q-learning with temporal memory to navigate turbulence

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Rando, Marco, James, Martin, Verri, Alessandro, Rosasco, Lorenzo, Seminara, Agnese
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Rando, Marco
James, Martin
Verri, Alessandro
Rosasco, Lorenzo
Seminara, Agnese
author_facet Rando, Marco
James, Martin
Verri, Alessandro
Rosasco, Lorenzo
Seminara, Agnese
contents We consider the problem of olfactory searches in a turbulent environment. We focus on agents that respond solely to odor stimuli, with no access to spatial perception nor prior information about the odor. We ask whether navigation to a target can be learned robustly within a sequential decision making framework. We develop a reinforcement learning algorithm using a small set of interpretable olfactory states and train it with realistic turbulent odor cues. By introducing a temporal memory, we demonstrate that two salient features of odor traces, discretized in few olfactory states, are sufficient to learn navigation in a realistic odor plume. Performance is dictated by the sparse nature of turbulent odors. An optimal memory exists which ignores blanks within the plume and activates a recovery strategy outside the plume. We obtain the best performance by letting agents learn their recovery strategy and show that it is mostly casting cross wind, similar to behavior observed in flying insects. The optimal strategy is robust to substantial changes in the odor plumes, suggesting minor parameter tuning may be sufficient to adapt to different environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_17495
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Q-learning with temporal memory to navigate turbulence
Rando, Marco
James, Martin
Verri, Alessandro
Rosasco, Lorenzo
Seminara, Agnese
Biological Physics
Machine Learning
We consider the problem of olfactory searches in a turbulent environment. We focus on agents that respond solely to odor stimuli, with no access to spatial perception nor prior information about the odor. We ask whether navigation to a target can be learned robustly within a sequential decision making framework. We develop a reinforcement learning algorithm using a small set of interpretable olfactory states and train it with realistic turbulent odor cues. By introducing a temporal memory, we demonstrate that two salient features of odor traces, discretized in few olfactory states, are sufficient to learn navigation in a realistic odor plume. Performance is dictated by the sparse nature of turbulent odors. An optimal memory exists which ignores blanks within the plume and activates a recovery strategy outside the plume. We obtain the best performance by letting agents learn their recovery strategy and show that it is mostly casting cross wind, similar to behavior observed in flying insects. The optimal strategy is robust to substantial changes in the odor plumes, suggesting minor parameter tuning may be sufficient to adapt to different environments.
title Q-learning with temporal memory to navigate turbulence
topic Biological Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17495