Imitation Learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. Somewhat counterintuitively, we show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning, which is commonly considered more difficult. We conduct experiments which confirm that our reduction works well in practice for a continuous control task.
In imitation learning, it is common to learn a behavior policy to match an unknown target policy via max-likelihood training on a collected set of target demonstrations. In this work, we consider using offline experience datasets - potentially far from the target distribution - to learn low-dimensional state representations that provably accelerate the sample-efficiency of downstream imitation learning. A central challenge in this setting is that the unknown target policy itself may not exhibit low-dimensional behavior, and so there is a potential for the representation learning objective to alias states in which the target policy acts differently. Circumventing this challenge, we derive a representation learning objective that provides an upper bound on the performance difference between the target policy and a lowdimensional policy trained with max-likelihood, and this bound is tight regardless of whether the target policy itself exhibits low-dimensional structure. Moving to the practicality of our method, we show that our objective can be implemented as contrastive learning, in which the transition dynamics are approximated by either an implicit energy-based model or, in some special cases, an implicit linear model with representations given by random Fourier features. Experiments on both tabular environments and high-dimensional Atari games provide quantitative evidence for the practical benefits of our proposed objective.
How can a reinforcement learning (RL) agent prepare to solve downstream tasks if those tasks are not known a priori? One approach is unsupervised skill discovery, a class of algorithms that learn a set of policies without access to a reward function. Such algorithms bear a close resemblance to representation learning algorithms (e.g., contrastive learning) in supervised learning, in that both are pretraining algorithms that maximize some approximation to a mutual information objective. While prior work has shown that the set of skills learned by such methods can accelerate downstream RL tasks, prior work offers little analysis into whether these skill learning algorithms are optimal, or even what notion of optimality would be appropriate to apply to them. In this work, we show that unsupervised skill discovery algorithms based on mutual information maximization do not learn skills that are optimal for every possible reward function. However, we show that the distribution over skills provides an optimal initialization minimizing regret against adversarially-chosen reward functions, assuming a certain type of adaptation procedure. Our analysis also provides a geometric perspective on these skill learning methods.
We address the issue of tuning hyperparameters (HPs) for imitation learning algorithms in the context of continuous-control, when the underlying reward function of the demonstrating expert cannot be observed at any time. The vast literature in imitation learning mostly considers this reward function to be available for HP selection, but this is not a realistic setting. Indeed, would this reward function be available, it could then directly be used for policy training and imitation would not be necessary. To tackle this mostly ignored problem, we propose a number of possible proxies to the external reward. We evaluate them in an extensive empirical study (more than 10'000 agents across 9 environments) and make practical recommendations for selecting HPs. Our results show that while imitation learning algorithms are sensitive to HP choices, it is often possible to select good enough HPs through a proxy to the reward function.
This paper surveys the field of transfer learning in the problem setting of Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL has been the key solution to sequential decision-making problems. Along with the fast advance of RL in various domains. including robotics and game-playing, transfer learning arises as an important technique to assist RL by leveraging and transferring external expertise to boost the learning process. In this survey, we review the central issues of transfer learning in the RL domain, providing a systematic categorization of its state-of-the-art techniques. We analyze their goals, methodologies, applications, and the RL frameworks under which these transfer learning techniques would be approachable. We discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other relevant topics from an RL perspective and also explore the potential challenges as well as future development directions for transfer learning in RL.
Text-based adventure games provide a platform on which to explore reinforcement learning in the context of a combinatorial action space, such as natural language. We present a deep reinforcement learning architecture that represents the game state as a knowledge graph which is learned during exploration. This graph is used to prune the action space, enabling more efficient exploration. The question of which action to take can be reduced to a question-answering task, a form of transfer learning that pre-trains certain parts of our architecture. In experiments using the TextWorld framework, we show that our proposed technique can learn a control policy faster than baseline alternatives. We have also open-sourced our code at //github.com/rajammanabrolu/KG-DQN.
Active learning from demonstration allows a robot to query a human for specific types of input to achieve efficient learning. Existing work has explored a variety of active query strategies; however, to our knowledge, none of these strategies directly minimize the performance risk of the policy the robot is learning. Utilizing recent advances in performance bounds for inverse reinforcement learning, we propose a risk-aware active inverse reinforcement learning algorithm that focuses active queries on areas of the state space with the potential for large generalization error. We show that risk-aware active learning outperforms standard active IRL approaches on gridworld, simulated driving, and table setting tasks, while also providing a performance-based stopping criterion that allows a robot to know when it has received enough demonstrations to safely perform a task.
Deep reinforcement learning suggests the promise of fully automated learning of robotic control policies that directly map sensory inputs to low-level actions. However, applying deep reinforcement learning methods on real-world robots is exceptionally difficult, due both to the sample complexity and, just as importantly, the sensitivity of such methods to hyperparameters. While hyperparameter tuning can be performed in parallel in simulated domains, it is usually impractical to tune hyperparameters directly on real-world robotic platforms, especially legged platforms like quadrupedal robots that can be damaged through extensive trial-and-error learning. In this paper, we develop a stable variant of the soft actor-critic deep reinforcement learning algorithm that requires minimal hyperparameter tuning, while also requiring only a modest number of trials to learn multilayer neural network policies. This algorithm is based on the framework of maximum entropy reinforcement learning, and automatically trades off exploration against exploitation by dynamically and automatically tuning a temperature parameter that determines the stochasticity of the policy. We show that this method achieves state-of-the-art performance on four standard benchmark environments. We then demonstrate that it can be used to learn quadrupedal locomotion gaits on a real-world Minitaur robot, learning to walk from scratch directly in the real world in two hours of training.
Eligibility traces are an effective technique to accelerate reinforcement learning by smoothly assigning credit to recently visited states. However, their online implementation is incompatible with modern deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which rely heavily on i.i.d. training data and offline learning. We utilize an efficient, recursive method for computing {\lambda}-returns offline that can provide the benefits of eligibility traces to any value-estimation or actor-critic method. We demonstrate how our method can be combined with DQN, DRQN, and A3C to greatly enhance the learning speed of these algorithms when playing Atari 2600 games, even under partial observability. Our results indicate several-fold improvements to sample efficiency on Seaquest and Q*bert. We expect similar results for other algorithms and domains not considered here, including those with continuous actions.
Deep learning (DL) is a high dimensional data reduction technique for constructing high-dimensional predictors in input-output models. DL is a form of machine learning that uses hierarchical layers of latent features. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art of deep learning from a modeling and algorithmic perspective. We provide a list of successful areas of applications in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Image Processing, Robotics and Automation. Deep learning is predictive in its nature rather then inferential and can be viewed as a black-box methodology for high-dimensional function estimation.
Meta-learning is a powerful tool that builds on multi-task learning to learn how to quickly adapt a model to new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms can acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by meta-learning prior tasks. The performance of meta-learning algorithms critically depends on the tasks available for meta-training: in the same way that supervised learning algorithms generalize best to test points drawn from the same distribution as the training points, meta-learning methods generalize best to tasks from the same distribution as the meta-training tasks. In effect, meta-reinforcement learning offloads the design burden from algorithm design to task design. If we can automate the process of task design as well, we can devise a meta-learning algorithm that is truly automated. In this work, we take a step in this direction, proposing a family of unsupervised meta-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning. We describe a general recipe for unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning, and describe an effective instantiation of this approach based on a recently proposed unsupervised exploration technique and model-agnostic meta-learning. We also discuss practical and conceptual considerations for developing unsupervised meta-learning methods. Our experimental results demonstrate that unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning effectively acquires accelerated reinforcement learning procedures without the need for manual task design, significantly exceeds the performance of learning from scratch, and even matches performance of meta-learning methods that use hand-specified task distributions.