Offline reinforcement learning (RL) tasks require the agent to learn from a pre-collected dataset with no further interactions with the environment. Despite the potential to surpass the behavioral policies, RL-based methods are generally impractical due to the training instability and bootstrapping the extrapolation errors, which always require careful hyperparameter tuning via online evaluation. In contrast, offline imitation learning (IL) has no such issues since it learns the policy directly without estimating the value function by bootstrapping. However, IL is usually limited in the capability of the behavioral policy and tends to learn a mediocre behavior from the dataset collected by the mixture of policies. In this paper, we aim to take advantage of IL but mitigate such a drawback. Observing that behavior cloning is able to imitate neighboring policies with less data, we propose \textit{Curriculum Offline Imitation Learning (COIL)}, which utilizes an experience picking strategy for imitating from adaptive neighboring policies with a higher return, and improves the current policy along curriculum stages. On continuous control benchmarks, we compare COIL against both imitation-based and RL-based methods, showing that it not only avoids just learning a mediocre behavior on mixed datasets but is also even competitive with state-of-the-art offline RL methods.
Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to translate sentences to semantic representation with a hierarchical structure, and is recently empowered by pretrained sequence-to-sequence models. However, there exists a gap between their flat training objective (i.e., equally treats all output tokens) and the hierarchical AMR structure, which limits the model generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose a Hierarchical Curriculum Learning (HCL) framework with Structure-level (SC) and Instance-level Curricula (IC). SC switches progressively from core to detail AMR semantic elements while IC transits from structure-simple to -complex AMR instances during training. Through these two warming-up processes, HCL reduces the difficulty of learning complex structures, thus the flat model can better adapt to the AMR hierarchy. Extensive experiments on AMR2.0, AMR3.0, structure-complex and out-of-distribution situations verify the effectiveness of HCL.
Deep neural network (DNN) suffers from catastrophic forgetting when learning incrementally, which greatly limits its applications. Although maintaining a handful of samples (called `exemplars`) of each task could alleviate forgetting to some extent, existing methods are still limited by the small number of exemplars since these exemplars are too few to carry enough task-specific knowledge, and therefore the forgetting remains. To overcome this problem, we propose to `imagine` diverse counterparts of given exemplars referring to the abundant semantic-irrelevant information from unlabeled data. Specifically, we develop a learnable feature generator to diversify exemplars by adaptively generating diverse counterparts of exemplars based on semantic information from exemplars and semantically-irrelevant information from unlabeled data. We introduce semantic contrastive learning to enforce the generated samples to be semantic consistent with exemplars and perform semanticdecoupling contrastive learning to encourage diversity of generated samples. The diverse generated samples could effectively prevent DNN from forgetting when learning new tasks. Our method does not bring any extra inference cost and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmarks CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-Subset by a clear margin.
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms designed for handling complex visual observations typically learn some sort of latent state representation, either explicitly or implicitly. Standard methods of this sort do not distinguish between functionally relevant aspects of the state and irrelevant distractors, instead aiming to represent all available information equally. We propose a modified objective for model-based RL that, in combination with mutual information maximization, allows us to learn representations and dynamics for visual model-based RL without reconstruction in a way that explicitly prioritizes functionally relevant factors. The key principle behind our design is to integrate a term inspired by variational empowerment into a state-space model based on mutual information. This term prioritizes information that is correlated with action, thus ensuring that functionally relevant factors are captured first. Furthermore, the same empowerment term also promotes faster exploration during the RL process, especially for sparse-reward tasks where the reward signal is insufficient to drive exploration in the early stages of learning. We evaluate the approach on a suite of vision-based robot control tasks with natural video backgrounds, and show that the proposed prioritized information objective outperforms state-of-the-art model based RL approaches with higher sample efficiency and episodic returns. //sites.google.com/view/information-empowerment
When cast into the Deep Reinforcement Learning framework, many robotics tasks require solving a long horizon and sparse reward problem, where learning algorithms struggle. In such context, Imitation Learning (IL) can be a powerful approach to bootstrap the learning process. However, most IL methods require several expert demonstrations which can be prohibitively difficult to acquire. Only a handful of IL algorithms have shown efficiency in the context of an extreme low expert data regime where a single expert demonstration is available. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm designed to imitate complex robotic tasks from the states of an expert trajectory. Based on a sequential inductive bias, our method divides the complex task into smaller skills. The skills are learned into a goal-conditioned policy that is able to solve each skill individually and chain skills to solve the entire task. We show that our method imitates a non-holonomic navigation task and scales to a complex simulated robotic manipulation task with very high sample efficiency.
Imitation learning aims to extract knowledge from human experts' demonstrations or artificially created agents in order to replicate their behaviors. Its success has been demonstrated in areas such as video games, autonomous driving, robotic simulations and object manipulation. However, this replicating process could be problematic, such as the performance is highly dependent on the demonstration quality, and most trained agents are limited to perform well in task-specific environments. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on imitation learning. We first introduce the background knowledge from development history and preliminaries, followed by presenting different taxonomies within Imitation Learning and key milestones of the field. We then detail challenges in learning strategies and present research opportunities with learning policy from suboptimal demonstration, voice instructions and other associated optimization schemes.
Training machine learning models in a meaningful order, from the easy samples to the hard ones, using curriculum learning can provide performance improvements over the standard training approach based on random data shuffling, without any additional computational costs. Curriculum learning strategies have been successfully employed in all areas of machine learning, in a wide range of tasks. However, the necessity of finding a way to rank the samples from easy to hard, as well as the right pacing function for introducing more difficult data can limit the usage of the curriculum approaches. In this survey, we show how these limits have been tackled in the literature, and we present different curriculum learning instantiations for various tasks in machine learning. We construct a multi-perspective taxonomy of curriculum learning approaches by hand, considering various classification criteria. We further build a hierarchical tree of curriculum learning methods using an agglomerative clustering algorithm, linking the discovered clusters with our taxonomy. At the end, we provide some interesting directions for future work.
We present CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning. CURL extracts high-level features from raw pixels using contrastive learning and performs off-policy control on top of the extracted features. CURL outperforms prior pixel-based methods, both model-based and model-free, on complex tasks in the DeepMind Control Suite and Atari Games showing 1.9x and 1.6x performance gains at the 100K environment and interaction steps benchmarks respectively. On the DeepMind Control Suite, CURL is the first image-based algorithm to nearly match the sample-efficiency and performance of methods that use state-based features.
This paper addresses the difficulty of forecasting multiple financial time series (TS) conjointly using deep neural networks (DNN). We investigate whether DNN-based models could forecast these TS more efficiently by learning their representation directly. To this end, we make use of the dynamic factor graph (DFG) from that we enhance by proposing a novel variable-length attention-based mechanism to render it memory-augmented. Using this mechanism, we propose an unsupervised DNN architecture for multivariate TS forecasting that allows to learn and take advantage of the relationships between these TS. We test our model on two datasets covering 19 years of investment funds activities. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms significantly typical DNN-based and statistical models at forecasting their 21-day price trajectory.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still requires a large amount of interaction with the environment, which can be prohibitively expensive in realistic scenarios. To address this problem, transfer learning has been applied to reinforcement learning such that experience gained in one task can be leveraged when starting to learn the next, harder task. More recently, several lines of research have explored how tasks, or data samples themselves, can be sequenced into a curriculum for the purpose of learning a problem that may otherwise be too difficult to learn from scratch. In this article, we present a framework for curriculum learning (CL) in reinforcement learning, and use it to survey and classify existing CL methods in terms of their assumptions, capabilities, and goals. Finally, we use our framework to find open problems and suggest directions for future RL curriculum learning research.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.