Applications on modern operating systems manage their ephemeral state in memory, and persistent state on disk. Ensuring consistency between them is a source of significant developer effort, yet still a source of significant bugs in mature applications. We present the Aurora single level store (SLS), an OS that simplifies persistence by automatically persisting all traditionally ephemeral application state. With recent storage hardware like NVMe SSDs and NVDIMMs, Aurora is able to continuously checkpoint entire applications with millisecond granularity.

Applications on modern operating systems manage their ephemeral state in memory and persistent state on disk. Ensuring consistency between them is a source of significant developer effort and application bugs. We present the Aurora single level store, an OS that eliminates the distinction between ephemeral and persistent application state.

One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is generalisation. In typical deep RL methods this is achieved by approximating the optimal value function with a low-dimensional representation using a deep network. While this approach works well in many domains, in domains where the optimal value function cannot easily be reduced to a low-dimensional representation, learning can be very slow and unstable. This paper contributes towards tackling such challenging domains, by proposing a new method, called Hybrid Reward Architecture (HRA). HRA takes as input a decomposed reward function and learns a separate value function for each component reward function. Because each component typically only depends on a subset of all features, the corresponding value function can be approximated more easily by a low-dimensional representation, enabling more effective learning. We demonstrate HRA on a toy-problem and the Atari game Ms. Pac-Man, where HRA achieves above-human performance.