Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in every possible state implies that the agent must understand, while also learning to maximize its reward, to ignore irrelevant actions such as $\textit{inapplicable actions}$ (i.e. actions that have no effect on the environment when performed in a given state). Knowing this information can help reduce the sample complexity of RL algorithms by masking the inapplicable actions from the policy distribution to only explore actions relevant to finding an optimal policy. This is typically done in an ad-hoc manner with hand-crafted domain logic added to the RL algorithm. In this paper, we propose a more systematic approach to introduce this knowledge into the algorithm. We (i) standardize the way knowledge can be manually specified to the agent; and (ii) present a new framework to autonomously learn these state-dependent action constraints jointly with the policy. We show experimentally that learning inapplicable actions greatly improves the sample efficiency of the algorithm by providing a reliable signal to mask out irrelevant actions. Moreover, we demonstrate that thanks to the transferability of the knowledge acquired, it can be reused in other tasks to make the learning process more efficient.
Offline reinforcement learning has developed rapidly over the recent years, but estimating the actual performance of offline policies still remains a challenge. We propose a scoring metric for offline policies that highly correlates with actual policy performance and can be directly used for offline policy optimization in a supervised manner. To achieve this, we leverage the contrastive learning framework to design a scoring metric that gives high scores to policies that imitate the actions yielding relatively high returns while avoiding those yielding relatively low returns. Our experiments show that 1) our scoring metric is able to more accurately rank offline policies and 2) the policies optimized using our metric show high performance on various offline reinforcement learning benchmarks. Notably, our algorithm has a much lower network capacity requirement for the policy network compared to other supervised learning-based methods and also does not need any additional networks such as a Q-network.
The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new paradigm called reinforcement learning from human preferences (or preference-based RL) has emerged as a promising solution, in which reward functions are learned from human preference labels among behavior trajectories. However, existing methods for preference-based RL are limited by the need for accurate oracle preference labels. This paper addresses this limitation by developing a method for crowd-sourcing preference labels and learning from diverse human preferences. The key idea is to stabilize reward learning through regularization and correction in a latent space. To ensure temporal consistency, a strong constraint is imposed on the reward model that forces its latent space to be close to the prior distribution. Additionally, a confidence-based reward model ensembling method is designed to generate more stable and reliable predictions. The proposed method is tested on a variety of tasks in DMcontrol and Meta-world and has shown consistent and significant improvements over existing preference-based RL algorithms when learning from diverse feedback, paving the way for real-world applications of RL methods.
In the sequential decision making setting, an agent aims to achieve systematic generalization over a large, possibly infinite, set of environments. Such environments are modeled as discrete Markov decision processes with both states and actions represented through a feature vector. The underlying structure of the environments allows the transition dynamics to be factored into two components: one that is environment-specific and another that is shared. Consider a set of environments that share the laws of motion as an example. In this setting, the agent can take a finite amount of reward-free interactions from a subset of these environments. The agent then must be able to approximately solve any planning task defined over any environment in the original set, relying on the above interactions only. Can we design a provably efficient algorithm that achieves this ambitious goal of systematic generalization? In this paper, we give a partially positive answer to this question. First, we provide a tractable formulation of systematic generalization by employing a causal viewpoint. Then, under specific structural assumptions, we provide a simple learning algorithm that guarantees any desired planning error up to an unavoidable sub-optimality term, while showcasing a polynomial sample complexity.
Recent research has turned to Reinforcement Learning (RL) to solve challenging decision problems, as an alternative to hand-tuned heuristics. RL can learn good policies without the need for modeling the environment's dynamics. Despite this promise, RL remains an impractical solution for many real-world systems problems. A particularly challenging case occurs when the environment changes over time, i.e. it exhibits non-stationarity. In this work, we characterize the challenges introduced by non-stationarity, shed light on the range of approaches to them and develop a robust framework for addressing them to train RL agents in live systems. Such agents must explore and learn new environments, without hurting the system's performance, and remember them over time. To this end, our framework (i) identifies different environments encountered by the live system, (ii) triggers exploration when necessary, (iii) takes precautions to retain knowledge from prior environments, and (iv) employs safeguards to protect the system's performance when the RL agent makes mistakes. We apply our framework to two systems problems, straggler mitigation and adaptive video streaming, and evaluate it against a variety of alternative approaches using real-world and synthetic data. We show that all components of the framework are necessary to cope with non-stationarity and provide guidance on alternative design choices for each component.
The past few years have seen rapid progress in combining reinforcement learning (RL) with deep learning. Various breakthroughs ranging from games to robotics have spurred the interest in designing sophisticated RL algorithms and systems. However, the prevailing workflow in RL is to learn tabula rasa, which may incur computational inefficiency. This precludes continuous deployment of RL algorithms and potentially excludes researchers without large-scale computing resources. In many other areas of machine learning, the pretraining paradigm has shown to be effective in acquiring transferable knowledge, which can be utilized for a variety of downstream tasks. Recently, we saw a surge of interest in Pretraining for Deep RL with promising results. However, much of the research has been based on different experimental settings. Due to the nature of RL, pretraining in this field is faced with unique challenges and hence requires new design principles. In this survey, we seek to systematically review existing works in pretraining for deep reinforcement learning, provide a taxonomy of these methods, discuss each sub-field, and bring attention to open problems and future directions.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
Graph mining tasks arise from many different application domains, ranging from social networks, transportation, E-commerce, etc., which have been receiving great attention from the theoretical and algorithm design communities in recent years, and there has been some pioneering work using the hotly researched reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to address graph data mining tasks. However, these graph mining algorithms and RL models are dispersed in different research areas, which makes it hard to compare different algorithms with each other. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of RL models and graph mining and generalize these algorithms to Graph Reinforcement Learning (GRL) as a unified formulation. We further discuss the applications of GRL methods across various domains and summarize the method description, open-source codes, and benchmark datasets of GRL methods. Finally, we propose possible important directions and challenges to be solved in the future. This is the latest work on a comprehensive survey of GRL literature, and this work provides a global view for researchers as well as a learning resource for researchers outside the domain. In addition, we create an online open-source for both interested researchers who want to enter this rapidly developing domain and experts who would like to compare GRL methods.
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.
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.
We study the problem of learning to reason in large scale knowledge graphs (KGs). More specifically, we describe a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning multi-hop relational paths: we use a policy-based agent with continuous states based on knowledge graph embeddings, which reasons in a KG vector space by sampling the most promising relation to extend its path. In contrast to prior work, our approach includes a reward function that takes the accuracy, diversity, and efficiency into consideration. Experimentally, we show that our proposed method outperforms a path-ranking based algorithm and knowledge graph embedding methods on Freebase and Never-Ending Language Learning datasets.