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Main Authors: Richtmann, Lea, Schmiesing, Viktoria-S., Wilken, Dennis, Heine, Jan, Tranter, Aaron, Anand, Avishek, Osborne, Tobias J., Heurs, Michèle
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15421
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author Richtmann, Lea
Schmiesing, Viktoria-S.
Wilken, Dennis
Heine, Jan
Tranter, Aaron
Anand, Avishek
Osborne, Tobias J.
Heurs, Michèle
author_facet Richtmann, Lea
Schmiesing, Viktoria-S.
Wilken, Dennis
Heine, Jan
Tranter, Aaron
Anand, Avishek
Osborne, Tobias J.
Heurs, Michèle
contents Setting up and controlling optical systems is often a challenging and tedious task. The high number of degrees of freedom to control mirrors, lenses, or phases of light makes automatic control challenging, especially when the complexity of the system cannot be adequately modeled due to noise or non-linearities. Here, we show that reinforcement learning (RL) can overcome these challenges when coupling laser light into an optical fiber, using a model-free RL approach that trains directly on the experiment without pre-training on simulations. By utilizing the sample-efficient algorithms Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC), or CrossQ, our agents learn to couple with 90% efficiency. A human expert reaches this efficiency, but the RL agents are quicker. In particular, the CrossQ agent outperforms the other agents in coupling speed while requiring only half the training time. We demonstrate that direct training on an experiment can replace extensive system modeling. Our result exemplifies RL's potential to tackle problems in optics, paving the way for more complex applications where full noise modeling is not feasible.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_15421
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Model-free reinforcement learning with noisy actions for automated experimental control in optics
Richtmann, Lea
Schmiesing, Viktoria-S.
Wilken, Dennis
Heine, Jan
Tranter, Aaron
Anand, Avishek
Osborne, Tobias J.
Heurs, Michèle
Machine Learning
Optics
J.2; I.2.1
Setting up and controlling optical systems is often a challenging and tedious task. The high number of degrees of freedom to control mirrors, lenses, or phases of light makes automatic control challenging, especially when the complexity of the system cannot be adequately modeled due to noise or non-linearities. Here, we show that reinforcement learning (RL) can overcome these challenges when coupling laser light into an optical fiber, using a model-free RL approach that trains directly on the experiment without pre-training on simulations. By utilizing the sample-efficient algorithms Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC), or CrossQ, our agents learn to couple with 90% efficiency. A human expert reaches this efficiency, but the RL agents are quicker. In particular, the CrossQ agent outperforms the other agents in coupling speed while requiring only half the training time. We demonstrate that direct training on an experiment can replace extensive system modeling. Our result exemplifies RL's potential to tackle problems in optics, paving the way for more complex applications where full noise modeling is not feasible.
title Model-free reinforcement learning with noisy actions for automated experimental control in optics
topic Machine Learning
Optics
J.2; I.2.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15421