Non-prehensile multi-object rearrangement is a robotic task of planning feasible paths and transferring multiple objects to their predefined target poses without grasping. It needs to consider how each object reaches the target and the order of object movement, which significantly deepens the complexity of the problem. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical policy to divide and conquer for non-prehensile multi-object rearrangement. In the high-level policy, guided by a designed policy network, the Monte Carlo Tree Search efficiently searches for the optimal rearrangement sequence among multiple objects, which benefits from imitation and reinforcement. In the low-level policy, the robot plans the paths according to the order of path primitives and manipulates the objects to approach the goal poses one by one. We verify through experiments that the proposed method can achieve a higher success rate, fewer steps, and shorter path length compared with the state-of-the-art.
Despite advances in hierarchical reinforcement learning, its applications to path planning in autonomous driving on highways are challenging. One reason is that conventional hierarchical reinforcement learning approaches are not amenable to autonomous driving due to its riskiness: the agent must move avoiding multiple obstacles such as other agents that are highly unpredictable, thus safe regions are small, scattered, and changeable over time. To overcome this challenge, we propose a spatially hierarchical reinforcement learning method for state space and policy space. The high-level policy selects not only behavioral sub-policy but also regions to pay mind to in state space and for outline in policy space. Subsequently, the low-level policy elaborates the short-term goal position of the agent within the outline of the region selected by the high-level command. The network structure and optimization suggested in our method are as concise as those of single-level methods. Experiments on the environment with various shapes of roads showed that our method finds the nearly optimal policies from early episodes, outperforming a baseline hierarchical reinforcement learning method, especially in narrow and complex roads. The resulting trajectories on the roads were similar to those of human strategies on the behavioral planning level.
Nonlinear state-space models are powerful tools to describe dynamical structures in complex time series. In a streaming setting where data are processed one sample at a time, simultaneous inference of the state and its nonlinear dynamics has posed significant challenges in practice. We develop a novel online learning framework, leveraging variational inference and sequential Monte Carlo, which enables flexible and accurate Bayesian joint filtering. Our method provides an approximation of the filtering posterior which can be made arbitrarily close to the true filtering distribution for a wide class of dynamics models and observation models. Specifically, the proposed framework can efficiently approximate a posterior over the dynamics using sparse Gaussian processes, allowing for an interpretable model of the latent dynamics. Constant time complexity per sample makes our approach amenable to online learning scenarios and suitable for real-time applications.
Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan, are available. Previous work has demonstrated efficient learning by hierarchal approaches consisting of path planning in the HL representation and using sub-goals derived from the plan to guide the RL policy in the source task. However, these approaches usually neglect the complex dynamics and sub-optimal sub-goal-reaching capabilities of the robot during planning. This work overcomes these limitations by proposing a novel hierarchical framework that utilizes a trainable planning policy for the HL representation. Thereby robot capabilities and environment conditions can be learned utilizing collected rollout data. We specifically introduce a planning policy based on value iteration with a learned transition model (VI-RL). In simulated robotic navigation tasks, VI-RL results in consistent strong improvement over vanilla RL, is on par with vanilla hierarchal RL on single layouts but more broadly applicable to multiple layouts, and is on par with trainable HL path planning baselines except for a parking task with difficult non-holonomic dynamics where it shows marked improvements.
In real world settings, numerous constraints are present which are hard to specify mathematically. However, for the real world deployment of reinforcement learning (RL), it is critical that RL agents are aware of these constraints, so that they can act safely. In this work, we consider the problem of learning constraints from demonstrations of a constraint-abiding agent's behavior. We experimentally validate our approach and show that our framework can successfully learn the most likely constraints that the agent respects. We further show that these learned constraints are \textit{transferable} to new agents that may have different morphologies and/or reward functions. Previous works in this regard have either mainly been restricted to tabular (discrete) settings, specific types of constraints or assume the environment's transition dynamics. In contrast, our framework is able to learn arbitrary \textit{Markovian} constraints in high-dimensions in a completely model-free setting. The code can be found it: \url{//github.com/shehryar-malik/icrl}.
To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on dense rewards for meta-training, and can fail catastrophically if the rewards are sparse. Without a suitable reward signal, the need for exploration during meta-training is exacerbated. To address this, we propose HyperX, which uses novel reward bonuses for meta-training to explore in approximate hyper-state space (where hyper-states represent the environment state and the agent's task belief). We show empirically that HyperX meta-learns better task-exploration and adapts more successfully to new tasks than existing methods.
Solving complex, temporally-extended tasks is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning (RL). We hypothesize that one critical element of solving such problems is the notion of compositionality. With the ability to learn concepts and sub-skills that can be composed to solve longer tasks, i.e. hierarchical RL, we can acquire temporally-extended behaviors. However, acquiring effective yet general abstractions for hierarchical RL is remarkably challenging. In this paper, we propose to use language as the abstraction, as it provides unique compositional structure, enabling fast learning and combinatorial generalization, while retaining tremendous flexibility, making it suitable for a variety of problems. Our approach learns an instruction-following low-level policy and a high-level policy that can reuse abstractions across tasks, in essence, permitting agents to reason using structured language. To study compositional task learning, we introduce an open-source object interaction environment built using the MuJoCo physics engine and the CLEVR engine. We find that, using our approach, agents can learn to solve to diverse, temporally-extended tasks such as object sorting and multi-object rearrangement, including from raw pixel observations. Our analysis find that the compositional nature of language is critical for learning diverse sub-skills and systematically generalizing to new sub-skills in comparison to non-compositional abstractions that use the same supervision.
Meta learning is a promising solution to few-shot learning problems. However, existing meta learning methods are restricted to the scenarios where training and application tasks share the same out-put structure. To obtain a meta model applicable to the tasks with new structures, it is required to collect new training data and repeat the time-consuming meta training procedure. This makes them inefficient or even inapplicable in learning to solve heterogeneous few-shot learning tasks. We thus develop a novel and principled HierarchicalMeta Learning (HML) method. Different from existing methods that only focus on optimizing the adaptability of a meta model to similar tasks, HML also explicitly optimizes its generalizability across heterogeneous tasks. To this end, HML first factorizes a set of similar training tasks into heterogeneous ones and trains the meta model over them at two levels to maximize adaptation and generalization performance respectively. The resultant model can then directly generalize to new tasks. Extensive experiments on few-shot classification and regression problems clearly demonstrate the superiority of HML over fine-tuning and state-of-the-art meta learning approaches in terms of generalization across heterogeneous tasks.
Despite deep reinforcement learning has recently achieved great successes, however in multiagent environments, a number of challenges still remain. Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is commonly considered to suffer from the problem of non-stationary environments and exponentially increasing policy space. It would be even more challenging to learn effective policies in circumstances where the rewards are sparse and delayed over long trajectories. In this paper, we study Hierarchical Deep Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (hierarchical deep MARL) in cooperative multiagent problems with sparse and delayed rewards, where efficient multiagent learning methods are desperately needed. We decompose the original MARL problem into hierarchies and investigate how effective policies can be learned hierarchically in synchronous/asynchronous hierarchical MARL frameworks. Several hierarchical deep MARL architectures, i.e., Ind-hDQN, hCom and hQmix, are introduced for different learning paradigms. Moreover, to alleviate the issues of sparse experiences in high-level learning and non-stationarity in multiagent settings, we propose a new experience replay mechanism, named as Augmented Concurrent Experience Replay (ACER). We empirically demonstrate the effects and efficiency of our approaches in several classic Multiagent Trash Collection tasks, as well as in an extremely challenging team sports game, i.e., Fever Basketball Defense.
Inferring other agents' mental states such as their knowledge, beliefs and intentions is thought to be essential for effective interactions with other agents. Recently, multiagent systems trained via deep reinforcement learning have been shown to succeed in solving different tasks, but it remains unclear how each agent modeled or represented other agents in their environment. In this work we test whether deep reinforcement learning agents explicitly represent other agents' intentions (their specific aims or goals) during a task in which the agents had to coordinate the covering of different spots in a 2D environment. In particular, we tracked over time the performance of a linear decoder trained to predict the final goal of all agents from the hidden state of each agent's neural network controller. We observed that the hidden layers of agents represented explicit information about other agents' goals, i.e. the target landmark they ended up covering. We also performed a series of experiments, in which some agents were replaced by others with fixed goals, to test the level of generalization of the trained agents. We noticed that during the training phase the agents developed a differential preference for each goal, which hindered generalization. To alleviate the above problem, we propose simple changes to the MADDPG training algorithm which leads to better generalization against unseen agents. We believe that training protocols promoting more active intention reading mechanisms, e.g. by preventing simple symmetry-breaking solutions, is a promising direction towards achieving a more robust generalization in different cooperative and competitive tasks.
This paper introduces a novel neural network-based reinforcement learning approach for robot gaze control. Our approach enables a robot to learn and to adapt its gaze control strategy for human-robot interaction neither with the use of external sensors nor with human supervision. The robot learns to focus its attention onto groups of people from its own audio-visual experiences, independently of the number of people, of their positions and of their physical appearances. In particular, we use a recurrent neural network architecture in combination with Q-learning to find an optimal action-selection policy; we pre-train the network using a simulated environment that mimics realistic scenarios that involve speaking/silent participants, thus avoiding the need of tedious sessions of a robot interacting with people. Our experimental evaluation suggests that the proposed method is robust against parameter estimation, i.e. the parameter values yielded by the method do not have a decisive impact on the performance. The best results are obtained when both audio and visual information is jointly used. Experiments with the Nao robot indicate that our framework is a step forward towards the autonomous learning of socially acceptable gaze behavior.