Despite the tremendous success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in simulation environments, applying RL to real-world applications still faces many challenges. A major concern is safety, in another word, constraint satisfaction. State-wise constraints are one of the most common constraints in real-world applications and one of the most challenging constraints in Safe RL. Enforcing state-wise constraints is necessary and essential to many challenging tasks such as autonomous driving, robot manipulation. This paper provides a comprehensive review of existing approaches that address state-wise constraints in RL. Under the framework of State-wise Constrained Markov Decision Process (SCMDP), we will discuss the connections, differences, and trade-offs of existing approaches in terms of (i) safety guarantee and scalability, (ii) safety and reward performance, and (iii) safety after convergence and during training. We also summarize limitations of current methods and discuss potential future directions.
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In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent in a given safe set. We establish a connection between this probabilistic-constrained setting and the cumulative-constrained formulation that is frequently explored in the existing literature. We provide theoretical bounds elucidating that the probabilistic-constrained setting offers a better trade-off in terms of optimality and safety (constraint satisfaction). The challenge encountered when dealing with the probabilistic constraints, as explored in this work, arises from the absence of explicit expressions for their gradients. Our prior work provides such an explicit gradient expression for probabilistic constraints which we term Safe Policy Gradient-REINFORCE (SPG-REINFORCE). In this work, we provide an improved gradient SPG-Actor-Critic that leads to a lower variance than SPG-REINFORCE, which is substantiated by our theoretical results. A noteworthy aspect of both SPGs is their inherent algorithm independence, rendering them versatile for application across a range of policy-based algorithms. Furthermore, we propose a Safe Primal-Dual algorithm that can leverage both SPGs to learn safe policies. It is subsequently followed by theoretical analyses that encompass the convergence of the algorithm, as well as the near-optimality and feasibility on average. In addition, we test the proposed approaches by a series of empirical experiments. These experiments aim to examine and analyze the inherent trade-offs between the optimality and safety, and serve to substantiate the efficacy of two SPGs, as well as our theoretical contributions.
Compositionality is a critical aspect of scalable system design. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown substantial success in task learning, but has only recently begun to truly leverage composition. In this paper, we focus on Boolean composition of learned tasks as opposed to functional or sequential composition. Existing Boolean composition for RL focuses on reaching a satisfying absorbing state in environments with discrete action spaces, but does not support composable safety (i.e., avoidance) constraints. We advance the state of the art in Boolean composition of learned tasks with three contributions: i) introduce two distinct notions of safety in this framework; ii) show how to enforce either safety semantics, prove correctness (under some assumptions), and analyze the trade-offs between the two safety notions; and iii) extend Boolean composition from discrete action spaces to continuous action spaces. We demonstrate these techniques using modified versions of value iteration in a grid world, Deep Q-Network (DQN) in a grid world with image observations, and Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3) in a continuous-observation and continuous-action Bullet physics environment. We believe that these contributions advance the theory of safe reinforcement learning by allowing zero-shot composition of policies satisfying safety properties.
Reinforcement Learning (RL), bolstered by the expressive capabilities of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for function approximation, has demonstrated considerable success in numerous applications. However, its practicality in addressing a wide range of real-world scenarios, characterized by diverse and unpredictable dynamics, noisy signals, and large state and action spaces, remains limited. This limitation stems from issues such as poor data efficiency, limited generalization capabilities, a lack of safety guarantees, and the absence of interpretability, among other factors. To overcome these challenges and improve performance across these crucial metrics, one promising avenue is to incorporate additional structural information about the problem into the RL learning process. Various sub-fields of RL have proposed methods for incorporating such inductive biases. We amalgamate these diverse methodologies under a unified framework, shedding light on the role of structure in the learning problem, and classify these methods into distinct patterns of incorporating structure. By leveraging this comprehensive framework, we provide valuable insights into the challenges associated with structured RL and lay the groundwork for a design pattern perspective on RL research. This novel perspective paves the way for future advancements and aids in the development of more effective and efficient RL algorithms that can potentially handle real-world scenarios better.
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) achieves tremendous success in sequential decision-making problems of many domains, it still faces key challenges of data inefficiency and the lack of interpretability. Interestingly, many researchers have leveraged insights from the causality literature recently, bringing forth flourishing works to unify the merits of causality and address well the challenges from RL. As such, it is of great necessity and significance to collate these Causal Reinforcement Learning (CRL) works, offer a review of CRL methods, and investigate the potential functionality from causality toward RL. In particular, we divide existing CRL approaches into two categories according to whether their causality-based information is given in advance or not. We further analyze each category in terms of the formalization of different models, ranging from the Markov Decision Process (MDP), Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP), Multi-Arm Bandits (MAB), and Dynamic Treatment Regime (DTR). Moreover, we summarize the evaluation matrices and open sources while we discuss emerging applications, along with promising prospects for the future development of CRL.
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A promising approach for alleviating these limitations is to cast the development of better RL algorithms as a machine learning problem itself in a process called meta-RL. Meta-RL is most commonly studied in a problem setting where, given a distribution of tasks, the goal is to learn a policy that is capable of adapting to any new task from the task distribution with as little data as possible. In this survey, we describe the meta-RL problem setting in detail as well as its major variations. We discuss how, at a high level, meta-RL research can be clustered based on the presence of a task distribution and the learning budget available for each individual task. Using these clusters, we then survey meta-RL algorithms and applications. We conclude by presenting the open problems on the path to making meta-RL part of the standard toolbox for a deep RL practitioner.
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.
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.
Data processing and analytics are fundamental and pervasive. Algorithms play a vital role in data processing and analytics where many algorithm designs have incorporated heuristics and general rules from human knowledge and experience to improve their effectiveness. Recently, reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in particular, is increasingly explored and exploited in many areas because it can learn better strategies in complicated environments it is interacting with than statically designed algorithms. Motivated by this trend, we provide a comprehensive review of recent works focusing on utilizing DRL to improve data processing and analytics. First, we present an introduction to key concepts, theories, and methods in DRL. Next, we discuss DRL deployment on database systems, facilitating data processing and analytics in various aspects, including data organization, scheduling, tuning, and indexing. Then, we survey the application of DRL in data processing and analytics, ranging from data preparation, natural language processing to healthcare, fintech, etc. Finally, we discuss important open challenges and future research directions of using DRL in data processing and analytics.
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.
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