Offline reinforcement learning learns an effective policy on offline datasets without online interaction, and it attracts persistent research attention due to its potential of practical application. However, extrapolation error generated by distribution shift will still lead to the overestimation for those actions that transit to out-of-distribution(OOD) states, which degrades the reliability and robustness of the offline policy. In this paper, we propose Contextual Conservative Q-Learning(C-CQL) to learn a robustly reliable policy through the contextual information captured via an inverse dynamics model. With the supervision of the inverse dynamics model, it tends to learn a policy that generates stable transition at perturbed states, for the fact that pertuebed states are a common kind of OOD states. In this manner, we enable the learnt policy more likely to generate transition that destines to the empirical next state distributions of the offline dataset, i.e., robustly reliable transition. Besides, we theoretically reveal that C-CQL is the generalization of the Conservative Q-Learning(CQL) and aggressive State Deviation Correction(SDC). Finally, experimental results demonstrate the proposed C-CQL achieves the state-of-the-art performance in most environments of offline Mujoco suite and a noisy Mujoco setting.
High altitude balloons have proved useful for ecological aerial surveys, atmospheric monitoring, and communication relays. However, due to weight and power constraints, there is a need to investigate alternate modes of propulsion to navigate in the stratosphere. Very recently, reinforcement learning has been proposed as a control scheme to maintain the balloon in the region of a fixed location, facilitated through diverse opposing wind-fields at different altitudes. Although air-pump based station keeping has been explored, there is no research on the control problem for venting and ballasting actuated balloons, which is commonly used as a low-cost alternative. We show how reinforcement learning can be used for this type of balloon. Specifically, we use the soft actor-critic algorithm, which on average is able to station-keep within 50\;km for 25\% of the flight, consistent with state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we show that the proposed controller effectively minimises the consumption of resources, thereby supporting long duration flights. We frame the controller as a continuous control reinforcement learning problem, which allows for a more diverse range of trajectories, as opposed to current state-of-the-art work, which uses discrete action spaces. Furthermore, through continuous control, we can make use of larger ascent rates which are not possible using air-pumps. The desired ascent-rate is decoupled into desired altitude and time-factor to provide a more transparent policy, compared to low-level control commands used in previous works. Finally, by applying the equations of motion, we establish appropriate thresholds for venting and ballasting to prevent the agent from exploiting the environment. More specifically, we ensure actions are physically feasible by enforcing constraints on venting and ballasting.
A core issue in multi-agent federated reinforcement learning is defining how to aggregate insights from multiple agents. This is commonly done by taking the average of each participating agent's model weights into one common model (FedAvg). We instead propose FedFormer, a novel federation strategy that utilizes Transformer Attention to contextually aggregate embeddings from models originating from different learner agents. In so doing, we attentively weigh the contributions of other agents with respect to the current agent's environment and learned relationships, thus providing a more effective and efficient federation. We evaluate our methods on the Meta-World environment and find that our approach yields significant improvements over FedAvg and non-federated Soft Actor-Critic single-agent methods. Our results compared to Soft Actor-Critic show that FedFormer achieves higher episodic return while still abiding by the privacy constraints of federated learning. Finally, we also demonstrate improvements in effectiveness with increased agent pools across all methods in certain tasks. This is contrasted by FedAvg, which fails to make noticeable improvements when scaled.
Recent methods for imitation learning directly learn a $Q$-function using an implicit reward formulation rather than an explicit reward function. However, these methods generally require implicit reward regularization to improve stability and often mistreat absorbing states. Previous works show that a squared norm regularization on the implicit reward function is effective, but do not provide a theoretical analysis of the resulting properties of the algorithms. In this work, we show that using this regularizer under a mixture distribution of the policy and the expert provides a particularly illuminating perspective: the original objective can be understood as squared Bellman error minimization, and the corresponding optimization problem minimizes a bounded $\chi^2$-Divergence between the expert and the mixture distribution. This perspective allows us to address instabilities and properly treat absorbing states. We show that our method, Least Squares Inverse Q-Learning (LS-IQ), outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, particularly in environments with absorbing states. Finally, we propose to use an inverse dynamics model to learn from observations only. Using this approach, we retain performance in settings where no expert actions are available.
Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) aims to learn effective multi-agent policies from pre-collected datasets, which is an important step toward the deployment of multi-agent systems in real-world applications. However, in practice, each individual behavior policy that generates multi-agent joint trajectories usually has a different level of how well it performs. e.g., an agent is a random policy while other agents are medium policies. In the cooperative game with global reward, one agent learned by existing offline MARL often inherits this random policy, jeopardizing the performance of the entire team. In this paper, we investigate offline MARL with explicit consideration on the diversity of agent-wise trajectories and propose a novel framework called Shared Individual Trajectories (SIT) to address this problem. Specifically, an attention-based reward decomposition network assigns the credit to each agent through a differentiable key-value memory mechanism in an offline manner. These decomposed credits are then used to reconstruct the joint offline datasets into prioritized experience replay with individual trajectories, thereafter agents can share their good trajectories and conservatively train their policies with a graph attention network (GAT) based critic. We evaluate our method in both discrete control (i.e., StarCraft II and multi-agent particle environment) and continuous control (i.e, multi-agent mujoco). The results indicate that our method achieves significantly better results in complex and mixed offline multi-agent datasets, especially when the difference of data quality between individual trajectories is large.
In this paper we pursue the question of a fully online trading algorithm (i.e. one that does not need offline training on previously gathered data). For this task we use Double Deep $Q$-learning in the episodic setting with Fast Learning Networks approximating the expected reward $Q$. Additionally, we define the possible terminal states of an episode in such a way as to introduce a mechanism to conserve some of the money in the trading pool when market conditions are seen as unfavourable. Some of these money are taken as profit and some are reused at a later time according to certain criteria. After describing the algorithm, we test it using the 1-minute-tick data for Cardano's price on Binance. We see that the agent performs better than trading with randomly chosen actions on each timestep. And it does so when tested on the whole dataset as well as on different subsets, capturing different market trends.
Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems are a rapidly evolving mode of transportation in which a centrally coordinated fleet of self-driving vehicles dynamically serves travel requests. The control of these systems is typically formulated as a large network optimization problem, and reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising approach to solve the open challenges in this space. However, current RL-based approaches exclusively focus on learning from online data, fundamentally ignoring the per-sample-cost of interactions within real-world transportation systems. To address these limitations, we propose to formalize the control of AMoD systems through the lens of offline reinforcement learning and learn effective control strategies via solely offline data, thus readily available to current mobility operators. We further investigate design decisions and provide experiments on real-world mobility systems showing how offline learning allows to recover AMoD control policies that (i) exhibit performance on par with online methods, (ii) drastically improve data efficiency, and (iii) completely eliminate the need for complex simulated environments. Crucially, this paper demonstrates that offline reinforcement learning is a promising paradigm for the application of RL-based solutions within economically-critical systems, such as mobility systems.
Route choice modeling is a fundamental task in transportation planning and demand forecasting. Classical methods generally adopt the discrete choice model (DCM) framework with linear utility functions and high-level route characteristics. While several recent studies have started to explore the applicability of deep learning for route choice modeling, they are limited to path-based models with relatively simple model architectures and relying on predefined choice sets. Existing link-based models can capture the dynamic nature of link choices within the trip without the need for choice set generation, but still assume linear relationships and link-additive features. To address these issues, this study proposes a general deep inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) framework for link-based route choice modeling, which is capable of incorporating diverse features (of the state, action and trip context) and capturing complex relationships. Specifically, we adapt an adversarial IRL model to the route choice problem for efficient estimation of context-dependent reward functions without value iteration. Experiment results based on taxi GPS data from Shanghai, China validate the superior prediction performance of the proposed model over conventional DCMs and other imitation learning baselines, even for destinations unseen in the training data. Further analysis show that the model exhibits competitive computational efficiency and reasonable interpretability. The proposed methodology provides a new direction for future development of route choice models. It is general and can be adaptable to other route choice problems across different modes and networks.
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents can leverage batches of previously collected data to extract a reasonable control policy. An emerging issue in this offline RL setting, however, is that the bootstrapping update underlying many of our methods suffers from insufficient action-coverage: standard max operator may select a maximal action that has not been seen in the dataset. Bootstrapping from these inaccurate values can lead to overestimation and even divergence. There are a growing number of methods that attempt to approximate an \emph{in-sample} max, that only uses actions well-covered by the dataset. We highlight a simple fact: it is more straightforward to approximate an in-sample \emph{softmax} using only actions in the dataset. We show that policy iteration based on the in-sample softmax converges, and that for decreasing temperatures it approaches the in-sample max. We derive an In-Sample Actor-Critic (AC), using this in-sample softmax, and show that it is consistently better or comparable to existing offline RL methods, and is also well-suited to fine-tuning.
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) struggles in environments with rich and noisy inputs, where the agent only has access to a fixed dataset without environment interactions. Past works have proposed common workarounds based on the pre-training of state representations, followed by policy training. In this work, we introduce a simple, yet effective approach for learning state representations. Our method, Behavior Prior Representation (BPR), learns state representations with an easy-to-integrate objective based on behavior cloning of the dataset: we first learn a state representation by mimicking actions from the dataset, and then train a policy on top of the fixed representation, using any off-the-shelf Offline RL algorithm. Theoretically, we prove that BPR carries out performance guarantees when integrated into algorithms that have either policy improvement guarantees (conservative algorithms) or produce lower bounds of the policy values (pessimistic algorithms). Empirically, we show that BPR combined with existing state-of-the-art Offline RL algorithms leads to significant improvements across several offline control benchmarks. The code is available at \url{//github.com/bit1029public/offline_bpr}.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.