Action Evaluation Hardware Accelerator for Next-Generation Real-Time Reinforcement Learning in Emerging IoT Systems

Jianchi Sun, Nikhilesh Sharma, Jacob Chakareski, Nicholas Mastronarde, Yingjie Lao

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) sensors often operate in unknown dynamic environments comprising latency-sensitive data sources, dynamic processing loads, and communication channels of unknown statistics. Such settings represent a natural application domain of reinforcement learning (RL), which enables computing and learning decision policies online, with no a priori knowledge. In our previous work, we introduced a post-decision state (PDS) based RL framework, which considerably accelerates the rate of learning an optimal decision policy. The present paper formulates an efficient hardware architecture for the action evaluation step, which is the most computationally-intensive step in the PDS based learning framework. By leveraging the unique characteristics of PDS learning, we optimize its state value expectation and known cost computational blocks, to speed-up the overall computation. Our experiments show that the optimized circuit is 49 times faster than its software implementation counterpart, and six times faster than a Q-learning hardware accelerator.