In recent years, gradient based Meta-RL (GMRL) methods have achieved remarkable successes in either discovering effective online hyperparameter for one single task (Xu et al., 2018) or learning good initialisation for multi-task transfer learning (Finn et al., 2017). Despite the empirical successes, it is often neglected that computing meta gradients via vanilla backpropagation is ill-defined. In this paper, we argue that the stochastic meta-gradient estimation adopted by many existing MGRL methods are in fact biased; the bias comes from two sources: 1) the compositional bias that is inborn in the structure of compositional optimisation problems and 2) the bias of multi-step Hessian estimation caused by direct automatic differentiation. To better understand the meta gradient biases, we perform the first of its kind study to quantify the amount for each of them. We start by providing a unifying derivation for existing GMRL algorithms, and then theoretically analyse both the bias and the variance of existing gradient estimation methods. On understanding the underlying principles of bias, we propose two mitigation solutions based on off-policy correction and multi-step Hessian estimation techniques. Comprehensive ablation studies have been conducted and results reveals: (1) The existence of these two biases and how they influence the meta-gradient estimation when combined with different estimator/sample size/step and learning rate. (2) The effectiveness of these mitigation approaches for meta-gradient estimation and thereby the final return on two practical Meta-RL algorithms: LOLA-DiCE and Meta-gradient Reinforcement Learning.
We consider the offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problem, in which the agent aims to compute a policy that maximizes expected return while satisfying given cost constraints, learning only from a pre-collected dataset. This problem setting is appealing in many real-world scenarios, where direct interaction with the environment is costly or risky, and where the resulting policy should comply with safety constraints. However, it is challenging to compute a policy that guarantees satisfying the cost constraints in the offline RL setting, since the off-policy evaluation inherently has an estimation error. In this paper, we present an offline constrained RL algorithm that optimizes the policy in the space of the stationary distribution. Our algorithm, COptiDICE, directly estimates the stationary distribution corrections of the optimal policy with respect to returns, while constraining the cost upper bound, with the goal of yielding a cost-conservative policy for actual constraint satisfaction. Experimental results show that COptiDICE attains better policies in terms of constraint satisfaction and return-maximization, outperforming baseline algorithms.
We present a data-efficient framework for solving sequential decision-making problems which exploits the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and latent variable generative models. The framework, called GenRL, trains deep policies by introducing an action latent variable such that the feed-forward policy search can be divided into two parts: (i) training a sub-policy that outputs a distribution over the action latent variable given a state of the system, and (ii) unsupervised training of a generative model that outputs a sequence of motor actions conditioned on the latent action variable. GenRL enables safe exploration and alleviates the data-inefficiency problem as it exploits prior knowledge about valid sequences of motor actions. Moreover, we provide a set of measures for evaluation of generative models such that we are able to predict the performance of the RL policy training prior to the actual training on a physical robot. We experimentally determine the characteristics of generative models that have most influence on the performance of the final policy training on two robotics tasks: shooting a hockey puck and throwing a basketball. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that GenRL is the only method which can safely and efficiently solve the robotics tasks compared to two state-of-the-art RL methods.
Covariance estimation for matrix-valued data has received an increasing interest in applications. Unlike previous works that rely heavily on matrix normal distribution assumption and the requirement of fixed matrix size, we propose a class of distribution-free regularized covariance estimation methods for high-dimensional matrix data under a separability condition and a bandable covariance structure. Under these conditions, the original covariance matrix is decomposed into a Kronecker product of two bandable small covariance matrices representing the variability over row and column directions. We formulate a unified framework for estimating bandable covariance, and introduce an efficient algorithm based on rank one unconstrained Kronecker product approximation. The convergence rates of the proposed estimators are established, and the derived minimax lower bound shows our proposed estimator is rate-optimal under certain divergence regimes of matrix size. We further introduce a class of robust covariance estimators and provide theoretical guarantees to deal with heavy-tailed data. We demonstrate the superior finite-sample performance of our methods using simulations and real applications from a gridded temperature anomalies dataset and a S&P 500 stock data analysis.
Policy gradient (PG) estimation becomes a challenge when we are not allowed to sample with the target policy but only have access to a dataset generated by some unknown behavior policy. Conventional methods for off-policy PG estimation often suffer from either significant bias or exponentially large variance. In this paper, we propose the double Fitted PG estimation (FPG) algorithm. FPG can work with an arbitrary policy parameterization, assuming access to a Bellman-complete value function class. In the case of linear value function approximation, we provide a tight finite-sample upper bound on policy gradient estimation error, that is governed by the amount of distribution mismatch measured in feature space. We also establish the asymptotic normality of FPG estimation error with a precise covariance characterization, which is further shown to be statistically optimal with a matching Cramer-Rao lower bound. Empirically, we evaluate the performance of FPG on both policy gradient estimation and policy optimization, using either softmax tabular or ReLU policy networks. Under various metrics, our results show that FPG significantly outperforms existing off-policy PG estimation methods based on importance sampling and variance reduction techniques.
Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of performant policies that are diverse with respect to quantified behavior. Recent work shows that differentiable quality diversity (DQD) algorithms greatly accelerate QD optimization when exact gradients are available. However, agent policies typically assume that the environment is not differentiable. To apply DQD algorithms to training agent policies, we must approximate gradients for performance and behavior. We propose two variants of the current state-of-the-art DQD algorithm that compute gradients via approximation methods common in reinforcement learning (RL). We evaluate our approach on four simulated locomotion tasks. One variant achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art in combining QD and RL, while the other performs comparably in two locomotion tasks. These results provide insight into the limitations of current DQD algorithms in domains where gradients must be approximated. Source code is available at //github.com/icaros-usc/dqd-rl
With the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, distributed optimization algorithms have attracted significant attention for power systems applications due to their potential for superior scalability, privacy, and robustness to a single point-of-failure. The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is a popular distributed optimization algorithm; however, its convergence performance is highly dependent on the selection of penalty parameters, which are usually chosen heuristically. In this work, we use reinforcement learning (RL) to develop an adaptive penalty parameter selection policy for the AC optimal power flow (ACOPF) problem solved via ADMM with the goal of minimizing the number of iterations until convergence. We train our RL policy using deep Q-learning, and show that this policy can result in significantly accelerated convergence (up to a 59% reduction in the number of iterations compared to existing, curvature-informed penalty parameter selection methods). Furthermore, we show that our RL policy demonstrates promise for generalizability, performing well under unseen loading schemes as well as under unseen losses of lines and generators (up to a 50% reduction in iterations). This work thus provides a proof-of-concept for using RL for parameter selection in ADMM for power systems applications.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known sample-inefficiency problem. This means that the algorithms are data-hungry and require millions of training samples to converge to an adequate policy. One way to combat this issue is to use action advising in a teacher-student framework, where a knowledgeable teacher provides action advice to help the student. This work considers how to better leverage uncertainties about when a student should ask for advice and if the student can model the teacher to ask for less advice. The student could decide to ask for advice when it is uncertain or when both it and its model of the teacher are uncertain. In addition to this investigation, this paper introduces a new method to compute uncertainty for a deep RL agent using a secondary neural network. Our empirical results show that using dual uncertainties to drive advice collection and reuse may improve learning performance across several Atari games.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic. It often surpasses traditional recommendation models even most deep learning-based methods, owing to its interactive nature and autonomous learning ability. Nevertheless, there are various challenges of RL when applying in recommender systems. Toward this end, we firstly provide a thorough overview, comparisons, and summarization of RL approaches for five typical recommendation scenarios, following three main categories of RL: value-function, policy search, and Actor-Critic. Then, we systematically analyze the challenges and relevant solutions on the basis of existing literature. Finally, under discussion for open issues of RL and its limitations of recommendation, we highlight some potential research directions in this field.
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 6 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.