Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning policies using pre-collected datasets without environment interaction, which provides a promising direction to make RL usable in real-world systems. Although recent offline RL studies have achieved much progress, existing methods still face many practical challenges in real-world system control tasks, such as computational restriction during agent training and the requirement of extra control flexibility. Model-based planning framework provides an attractive solution for such tasks. However, most model-based planning algorithms are not designed for offline settings. Simply combining the ingredients of offline RL with existing methods either provides over-restrictive planning or leads to inferior performance. We propose a new light-weighted model-based offline planning framework, namely MOPP, which tackles the dilemma between the restrictions of offline learning and high-performance planning. MOPP encourages more aggressive trajectory rollout guided by the behavior policy learned from data, and prunes out problematic trajectories to avoid potential out-of-distribution samples. Experimental results show that MOPP provides competitive performance compared with existing model-based offline planning and RL approaches.
Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to mischaracterizing deformable objects as rigid and impassable. Instead, we learn to predict an estimate of traversability of terrain regions and to prefer regions that are easier to navigate (e.g., short grass over small shrubs). Rather than predicting collisions, we instead regress on realized error compared to a canonical dynamics model. We train with an on-policy approach, resulting in successful navigation policies using as little as 50 minutes of training data split across simulation and real world. Our learning-based navigation system is a sample efficient short-term planner that we demonstrate on a Clearpath Husky navigating through a variety of terrain including grassland and forest
An important capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is autonomous landing while avoiding collision with obstacles in the process. Such capability requires real-time local trajectory planning. Although trajectory-planning methods have been introduced for cases such as emergency landing, they have not been evaluated in real-life scenarios where only the surface of obstacles can be sensed and detected. We propose a novel optimization framework using a pre-planned global path and a priority map of the landing area. Several trajectory planning algorithms were implemented and evaluated in a simulator that includes a 3D urban environment, LiDAR-based obstacle-surface sensing and UAV guidance and dynamics. We show that using our proposed optimization criterion can successfully improve the landing-mission success probability while avoiding collisions with obstacles in real-time.
Active inference is a unifying theory for perception and action resting upon the idea that the brain maintains an internal model of the world by minimizing free energy. From a behavioral perspective, active inference agents can be seen as self-evidencing beings that act to fulfill their optimistic predictions, namely preferred outcomes or goals. In contrast, reinforcement learning requires human-designed rewards to accomplish any desired outcome. Although active inference could provide a more natural self-supervised objective for control, its applicability has been limited because of the shortcomings in scaling the approach to complex environments. In this work, we propose a contrastive objective for active inference that strongly reduces the computational burden in learning the agent's generative model and planning future actions. Our method performs notably better than likelihood-based active inference in image-based tasks, while also being computationally cheaper and easier to train. We compare to reinforcement learning agents that have access to human-designed reward functions, showing that our approach closely matches their performance. Finally, we also show that contrastive methods perform significantly better in the case of distractors in the environment and that our method is able to generalize goals to variations in the background.
Computational design problems arise in a number of settings, from synthetic biology to computer architectures. In this paper, we aim to solve data-driven model-based optimization (MBO) problems, where the goal is to find a design input that maximizes an unknown objective function provided access to only a static dataset of prior experiments. Such data-driven optimization procedures are the only practical methods in many real-world domains where active data collection is expensive (e.g., when optimizing over proteins) or dangerous (e.g., when optimizing over aircraft designs). Typical methods for MBO that optimize the design against a learned model suffer from distributional shift: it is easy to find a design that "fools" the model into predicting a high value. To overcome this, we propose conservative objective models (COMs), a method that learns a model of the objective function that lower bounds the actual value of the ground-truth objective on out-of-distribution inputs, and uses it for optimization. Structurally, COMs resemble adversarial training methods used to overcome adversarial examples. COMs are simple to implement and outperform a number of existing methods on a wide range of MBO problems, including optimizing protein sequences, robot morphologies, neural network weights, and superconducting materials.
Collaborative filtering (CF), as a fundamental approach for recommender systems, is usually built on the latent factor model with learnable parameters to predict users' preferences towards items. However, designing a proper CF model for a given data is not easy, since the properties of datasets are highly diverse. In this paper, motivated by the recent advances in automated machine learning (AutoML), we propose to design a data-specific CF model by AutoML techniques. The key here is a new framework that unifies state-of-the-art (SOTA) CF methods and splits them into disjoint stages of input encoding, embedding function, interaction function, and prediction function. We further develop an easy-to-use, robust, and efficient search strategy, which utilizes random search and a performance predictor for efficient searching within the above framework. In this way, we can combinatorially generalize data-specific CF models, which have not been visited in the literature, from SOTA ones. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our method can consistently outperform SOTA ones for various CF tasks. Further experiments verify the rationality of the proposed framework and the efficiency of the search strategy. The searched CF models can also provide insights for exploring more effective methods in the future
We present Neural A*, a novel data-driven search method for path planning problems. Despite the recent increasing attention to data-driven path planning, a machine learning approach to search-based planning is still challenging due to the discrete nature of search algorithms. In this work, we reformulate a canonical A* search algorithm to be differentiable and couple it with a convolutional encoder to form an end-to-end trainable neural network planner. Neural A* solves a path planning problem by encoding a problem instance to a guidance map and then performing the differentiable A* search with the guidance map. By learning to match the search results with ground-truth paths provided by experts, Neural A* can produce a path consistent with the ground truth accurately and efficiently. Our extensive experiments confirmed that Neural A* outperformed state-of-the-art data-driven planners in terms of the search optimality and efficiency trade-off, and furthermore, successfully predicted realistic human trajectories by directly performing search-based planning on natural image inputs.
Retrosynthetic planning is a critical task in organic chemistry which identifies a series of reactions that can lead to the synthesis of a target product. The vast number of possible chemical transformations makes the size of the search space very big, and retrosynthetic planning is challenging even for experienced chemists. However, existing methods either require expensive return estimation by rollout with high variance, or optimize for search speed rather than the quality. In this paper, we propose Retro*, a neural-based A*-like algorithm that finds high-quality synthetic routes efficiently. It maintains the search as an AND-OR tree, and learns a neural search bias with off-policy data. Then guided by this neural network, it performs best-first search efficiently during new planning episodes. Experiments on benchmark USPTO datasets show that, our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art with respect to both the success rate and solution quality, while being more efficient at the same time.
To solve complex real-world problems with reinforcement learning, we cannot rely on manually specified reward functions. Instead, we can have humans communicate an objective to the agent directly. In this work, we combine two approaches to learning from human feedback: expert demonstrations and trajectory preferences. We train a deep neural network to model the reward function and use its predicted reward to train an DQN-based deep reinforcement learning agent on 9 Atari games. Our approach beats the imitation learning baseline in 7 games and achieves strictly superhuman performance on 2 games without using game rewards. Additionally, we investigate the goodness of fit of the reward model, present some reward hacking problems, and study the effects of noise in the human labels.
In this work, we take a representation learning perspective on hierarchical reinforcement learning, where the problem of learning lower layers in a hierarchy is transformed into the problem of learning trajectory-level generative models. We show that we can learn continuous latent representations of trajectories, which are effective in solving temporally extended and multi-stage problems. Our proposed model, SeCTAR, draws inspiration from variational autoencoders, and learns latent representations of trajectories. A key component of this method is to learn both a latent-conditioned policy and a latent-conditioned model which are consistent with each other. Given the same latent, the policy generates a trajectory which should match the trajectory predicted by the model. This model provides a built-in prediction mechanism, by predicting the outcome of closed loop policy behavior. We propose a novel algorithm for performing hierarchical RL with this model, combining model-based planning in the learned latent space with an unsupervised exploration objective. We show that our model is effective at reasoning over long horizons with sparse rewards for several simulated tasks, outperforming standard reinforcement learning methods and prior methods for hierarchical reasoning, model-based planning, and exploration.
Existing methods for interactive image retrieval have demonstrated the merit of integrating user feedback, improving retrieval results. However, most current systems rely on restricted forms of user feedback, such as binary relevance responses, or feedback based on a fixed set of relative attributes, which limits their impact. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to interactive image search that enables users to provide feedback via natural language, allowing for more natural and effective interaction. We formulate the task of dialog-based interactive image retrieval as a reinforcement learning problem, and reward the dialog system for improving the rank of the target image during each dialog turn. To avoid the cumbersome and costly process of collecting human-machine conversations as the dialog system learns, we train our system with a user simulator, which is itself trained to describe the differences between target and candidate images. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated in a footwear retrieval application. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world data show that 1) our proposed learning framework achieves better accuracy than other supervised and reinforcement learning baselines and 2) user feedback based on natural language rather than pre-specified attributes leads to more effective retrieval results, and a more natural and expressive communication interface.