Augmented Lagrangian-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning Approach for Distribution System Volt/VAR Control

This paper proposes a data-driven solution for Volt-VAR control problem in active distribution system. As distribution system models are always inaccurate and incomplete, it is quite difficult to solve the problem. To handle with this dilemma, this paper formulates the Volt-VAR control problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). By synergistically combining the augmented Lagrangian method and soft actor critic algorithm, a novel safe off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) approach is proposed in this paper to solve the CMDP. The actor network is updated in a policy gradient manner with the Lagrangian value function. A double-critics network is adopted to synchronously estimate the action-value function to avoid overestimation bias. The proposed algorithm does not require strong convexity guarantee of examined problems and is sample efficient. A two-stage strategy is adopted for offline training and online execution, so the accurate distribution system model is no longer needed. To achieve scalability, a centralized training distributed execution strategy is adopted for a multi-agent framework, which enables a decentralized Volt-VAR control for large-scale distribution system. Comprehensive numerical experiments with real-world electricity data demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can achieve high solution optimality and constraints compliance.

SkyScript-100M: 1,000,000,000 Pairs of Scripts and Shooting Scripts for Short Drama

Generating high-quality shooting scripts containing information such as scene and shot language is essential for short drama script generation. We collect 6,660 popular short drama episodes from the Internet, each with an average of 100 short episodes, and the total number of short episodes is about 80,000, with a total duration of about 2,000 hours and totaling 10 terabytes (TB). We perform keyframe extraction and annotation on each episode to obtain about 10,000,000 shooting scripts. We perform 100 script restorations on the extracted shooting scripts based on our self-developed large short drama generation model SkyReels. This leads to a dataset containing 1,000,000,000 pairs of scripts and shooting scripts for short dramas, called SkyScript-100M. We compare SkyScript-100M with the existing dataset in detail and demonstrate some deeper insights that can be achieved based on SkyScript-100M. Based on SkyScript-100M, researchers can achieve several deeper and more far-reaching script optimization goals, which may drive a paradigm shift in the entire field of text-to-video and significantly advance the field of short drama video generation. The data and code are available at https://github.com/vaew/SkyScript-100M.

Towards Playing Full MOBA Games with Deep Reinforcement Learning

MOBA games, e.g., Honor of Kings, League of Legends, and Dota 2, pose grand challenges to AI systems such as multi-agent, enormous state-action space, complex action control, etc. Developing AI for playing MOBA games has raised much attention accordingly. However, existing work falls short in handling the raw game complexity caused by the explosion of agent combinations, i.e., lineups, when expanding the hero pool in case that OpenAI's Dota AI limits the play to a pool of only 17 heroes. As a result, full MOBA games without restrictions are far from being mastered by any existing AI system. In this paper, we propose a MOBA AI learning paradigm that methodologically enables playing full MOBA games with deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, we develop a combination of novel and existing learning techniques, including curriculum self-play learning, policy distillation, off-policy adaption, multi-head value estimation, and Monte-Carlo tree-search, in training and playing a large pool of heroes, meanwhile addressing the scalability issue skillfully. Tested on Honor of Kings, a popular MOBA game, we show how to build superhuman AI agents that can defeat top esports players. The superiority of our AI is demonstrated by the first large-scale performance test of MOBA AI agent in the literature.

Supervised Learning Achieves Human-Level Performance in MOBA Games: A Case Study of Honor of Kings

We present JueWu-SL, the first supervised-learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) program that achieves human-level performance in playing multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games. Unlike prior attempts, we integrate the macro-strategy and the micromanagement of MOBA-game-playing into neural networks in a supervised and end-to-end manner. Tested on Honor of Kings, the most popular MOBA at present, our AI performs competitively at the level of High King players in standard 5v5 games.

PSF-LO: Parameterized Semantic Features Based Lidar Odometry

Lidar odometry (LO) is a key technology in numerous reliable and accurate localization and mapping systems of autonomous driving. The state-of-the-art LO methods generally leverage geometric information to perform point cloud registration. Furthermore, obtaining point cloud semantic information which can describe the environment more abundantly will help for the registration. We present a novel semantic lidar odometry method based on self-designed parameterized semantic features (PSFs) to achieve low-drift ego-motion estimation for autonomous vehicle in realtime. We first use a convolutional neural network-based algorithm to obtain point-wise semantics from the input laser point cloud, and then use semantic labels to separate the road, building, traffic sign and pole-like point cloud and fit them separately to obtain corresponding PSFs. A fast PSF-based matching enable us to refine geometric features (GeFs) registration, reducing the impact of blurred submap surface on the accuracy of GeFs matching. Besides, we design an efficient method to accurately recognize and remove the dynamic objects while retaining static ones in the semantic point cloud, which are beneficial to further improve the accuracy of LO. We evaluated our method, namely PSF-LO, on the public dataset KITTI Odometry Benchmark and ranked #1 among semantic lidar methods with an average translation error of 0.82% in the test dataset at the time of writing.

3D Lidar Mapping Relative Accuracy Automatic Evaluation Algorithm

HD (High Definition) map based on 3D lidar plays a vital role in autonomous vehicle localization, planning, decision-making, perception, etc. Many 3D lidar mapping technologies related to SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) are used in HD map construction to ensure its high accuracy. To evaluate the accuracy of 3D lidar mapping, the most common methods use ground truth of poses to calculate the error between estimated poses and ground truth, however it's usually so difficult to get the ground truth of poses in the actual lidar mapping for autonomous vehicle. In this paper, we proposed a relative accuracy evaluation algorithm that can automatically evaluate the accuracy of HD map built by 3D lidar mapping without ground truth. A method for detecting the degree of ghosting in point cloud map quantitatively is designed to reflect the accuracy indirectly, which takes advantage of the principle of light traveling in a straight line and the fact that light can not penetrate opaque objects. Our experimental results confirm that the proposed evaluation algorithm can automatically and efficiently detect the bad poses whose accuracy are less than the set threshold such as 0.1m, then calculate the bad poses percentage P_bad in all estimated poses to obtain the final accuracy metric P_acc = 1 - P_bad.