Transfer Learning has shown great potential to enhance single-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) efficiency. Similarly, Multiagent RL (MARL) can also be accelerated if agents can share knowledge with each other. However, it remains a problem of how an agent should learn from other agents. In this paper, we propose a novel Multiagent Policy Transfer Framework (MAPTF) to improve MARL efficiency. MAPTF learns which agent's policy is the best to reuse for each agent and when to terminate it by modeling multiagent policy transfer as the option learning problem. Furthermore, in practice, the option module can only collect all agent's local experiences for update due to the partial observability of the environment. While in this setting, each agent's experience may be inconsistent with each other, which may cause the inaccuracy and oscillation of the option-value's estimation. Therefore, we propose a novel option learning algorithm, the successor representation option learning to solve it by decoupling the environment dynamics from rewards and learning the option-value under each agent's preference. MAPTF can be easily combined with existing deep RL and MARL approaches, and experimental results show it significantly boosts the performance of existing methods in both discrete and continuous state spaces.
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.
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.
Discovering causal structure among a set of variables is a fundamental problem in many empirical sciences. Traditional score-based casual discovery methods rely on various local heuristics to search for a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) according to a predefined score function. While these methods, e.g., greedy equivalence search, may have attractive results with infinite samples and certain model assumptions, they are usually less satisfactory in practice due to finite data and possible violation of assumptions. Motivated by recent advances in neural combinatorial optimization, we propose to use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to search for the DAG with the best scoring. Our encoder-decoder model takes observable data as input and generates graph adjacency matrices that are used to compute rewards. The reward incorporates both the predefined score function and two penalty terms for enforcing acyclicity. In contrast with typical RL applications where the goal is to learn a policy, we use RL as a search strategy and our final output would be the graph, among all graphs generated during training, that achieves the best reward. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, and show that the proposed approach not only has an improved search ability but also allows a flexible score function under the acyclicity constraint.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still requires a large amount of interaction with the environment, which can be prohibitively expensive in realistic scenarios. To address this problem, transfer learning has been applied to reinforcement learning such that experience gained in one task can be leveraged when starting to learn the next, harder task. More recently, several lines of research have explored how tasks, or data samples themselves, can be sequenced into a curriculum for the purpose of learning a problem that may otherwise be too difficult to learn from scratch. In this article, we present a framework for curriculum learning (CL) in reinforcement learning, and use it to survey and classify existing CL methods in terms of their assumptions, capabilities, and goals. Finally, we use our framework to find open problems and suggest directions for future RL curriculum learning research.
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.
Recent studies have shown the vulnerability of reinforcement learning (RL) models in noisy settings. The sources of noises differ across scenarios. For instance, in practice, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise (e.g., when observed rewards are collected through sensors), and thus observed rewards may not be credible as a result. Also, in applications such as robotics, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm can be manipulated to produce arbitrary errors. In this paper, we consider noisy RL problems where observed rewards by RL agents are generated with a reward confusion matrix. We call such observed rewards as perturbed rewards. We develop an unbiased reward estimator aided robust RL framework that enables RL agents to learn in noisy environments while observing only perturbed rewards. Our framework draws upon approaches for supervised learning with noisy data. The core ideas of our solution include estimating a reward confusion matrix and defining a set of unbiased surrogate rewards. We prove the convergence and sample complexity of our approach. Extensive experiments on different DRL platforms show that policies based on our estimated surrogate reward can achieve higher expected rewards, and converge faster than existing baselines. For instance, the state-of-the-art PPO algorithm is able to obtain 67.5% and 46.7% improvements in average on five Atari games, when the error rates are 10% and 30% respectively.
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.
This paper presents a new multi-objective deep reinforcement learning (MODRL) framework based on deep Q-networks. We propose the use of linear and non-linear methods to develop the MODRL framework that includes both single-policy and multi-policy strategies. The experimental results on two benchmark problems including the two-objective deep sea treasure environment and the three-objective mountain car problem indicate that the proposed framework is able to converge to the optimal Pareto solutions effectively. The proposed framework is generic, which allows implementation of different deep reinforcement learning algorithms in different complex environments. This therefore overcomes many difficulties involved with standard multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) methods existing in the current literature. The framework creates a platform as a testbed environment to develop methods for solving various problems associated with the current MORL. Details of the framework implementation can be referred to //www.deakin.edu.au/~thanhthi/drl.htm.
Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods are limited typically to a small number of agents. When the agent number increases largely, the learning becomes intractable due to the curse of the dimensionality and the exponential growth of agent interactions. In this paper, we present Mean Field Reinforcement Learning where the interactions within the population of agents are approximated by those between a single agent and the average effect from the overall population or neighboring agents; the interplay between the two entities is mutually reinforced: the learning of the individual agent's optimal policy depends on the dynamics of the population, while the dynamics of the population change according to the collective patterns of the individual policies. We develop practical mean field Q-learning and mean field Actor-Critic algorithms and analyze the convergence of the solution to Nash equilibrium. Experiments on Gaussian squeeze, Ising model, and battle games justify the learning effectiveness of our mean field approaches. In addition, we report the first result to solve the Ising model via model-free reinforcement learning methods.