We propose Algorithm Distillation (AD), a method for distilling reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms into neural networks by modeling their training histories with a causal sequence model. Algorithm Distillation treats learning to reinforcement learn as an across-episode sequential prediction problem. A dataset of learning histories is generated by a source RL algorithm, and then a causal transformer is trained by autoregressively predicting actions given their preceding learning histories as context. Unlike sequential policy prediction architectures that distill post-learning or expert sequences, AD is able to improve its policy entirely in-context without updating its network parameters. We demonstrate that AD can reinforcement learn in-context in a variety of environments with sparse rewards, combinatorial task structure, and pixel-based observations, and find that AD learns a more data-efficient RL algorithm than the one that generated the source data.
Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown that humans often adopt a hyperbolic discounting scheme, which is optimal when a specific task termination time distribution is assumed. In this work, we propose a theory for continuous-time model-based reinforcement learning generalized to arbitrary discount functions. This formulation covers the case in which there is a non-exponential random termination time. We derive a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation characterizing the optimal policy and describe how it can be solved using a collocation method, which uses deep learning for function approximation. Further, we show how the inverse RL problem can be approached, in which one tries to recover properties of the discount function given decision data. We validate the applicability of our proposed approach on two simulated problems. Our approach opens the way for the analysis of human discounting in sequential decision-making tasks.
Controlling the generative model to adapt a new domain with limited samples is a difficult challenge and it is receiving increasing attention. Recently, methods based on meta-learning have shown promising results for few-shot domain adaptation. However, meta-learning-based methods usually suffer from the problem of overfitting, which results in a lack of diversity in the generated texts. To avoid this problem, in this study, a novel framework based on reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed. In this framework, to increase the sample utilization of RL and decrease its sample requirement, maximum likelihood estimation learning is incorporated into the RL process. When there are only a few in-domain samples available, experimental results on five target domains in two few-shot configurations show that this framework performs better than baselines.
Various types of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods have been developed, assuming that agents' policies are based on true states. Recent works have improved the robustness of MARL under uncertainties from the reward, transition probability, or other partners' policies. However, in real-world multi-agent systems, state estimations may be perturbed by sensor measurement noise or even adversaries. Agents' policies trained with only true state information will deviate from optimal solutions when facing adversarial state perturbations during execution. MARL under adversarial state perturbations has limited study. Hence, in this work, we propose a State-Adversarial Markov Game (SAMG) and make the first attempt to study the fundamental properties of MARL under state uncertainties. We prove that the optimal agent policy and the robust Nash equilibrium do not always exist for an SAMG. Instead, we define the solution concept, robust agent policy, of the proposed SAMG under adversarial state perturbations, where agents want to maximize the worst-case expected state value. We then design a gradient descent ascent-based robust MARL algorithm to learn the robust policies for the MARL agents. Our experiments show that adversarial state perturbations decrease agents' rewards for several baselines from the existing literature, while our algorithm outperforms baselines with state perturbations and significantly improves the robustness of the MARL policies under state uncertainties.
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) approaches empower end-users to teach robots novel tasks via demonstrations of the desired behaviors, democratizing access to robotics. However, current LfD frameworks are not capable of fast adaptation to heterogeneous human demonstrations nor the large-scale deployment in ubiquitous robotics applications. In this paper, we propose a novel LfD framework, Fast Lifelong Adaptive Inverse Reinforcement learning (FLAIR). Our approach (1) leverages learned strategies to construct policy mixtures for fast adaptation to new demonstrations, allowing for quick end-user personalization, (2) distills common knowledge across demonstrations, achieving accurate task inference; and (3) expands its model only when needed in lifelong deployments, maintaining a concise set of prototypical strategies that can approximate all behaviors via policy mixtures. We empirically validate that FLAIR achieves adaptability (i.e., the robot adapts to heterogeneous, user-specific task preferences), efficiency (i.e., the robot achieves sample-efficient adaptation), and scalability (i.e., the model grows sublinearly with the number of demonstrations while maintaining high performance). FLAIR surpasses benchmarks across three control tasks with an average 57% improvement in policy returns and an average 78% fewer episodes required for demonstration modeling using policy mixtures. Finally, we demonstrate the success of FLAIR in a table tennis task and find users rate FLAIR as having higher task (p<.05) and personalization (p<.05) performance.
We study the learning dynamics of self-predictive learning for reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that learn representations by minimizing the prediction error of their own future latent representations. Despite its recent empirical success, such algorithms have an apparent defect: trivial representations (such as constants) minimize the prediction error, yet it is obviously undesirable to converge to such solutions. Our central insight is that careful designs of the optimization dynamics are critical to learning meaningful representations. We identify that a faster paced optimization of the predictor and semi-gradient updates on the representation, are crucial to preventing the representation collapse. Then in an idealized setup, we show self-predictive learning dynamics carries out spectral decomposition on the state transition matrix, effectively capturing information of the transition dynamics. Building on the theoretical insights, we propose bidirectional self-predictive learning, a novel self-predictive algorithm that learns two representations simultaneously. We examine the robustness of our theoretical insights with a number of small-scale experiments and showcase the promise of the novel representation learning algorithm with large-scale experiments.
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) related technology has expanded knowledge in the area, bringing to light new problems and challenges that require solutions. Furthermore, because the technology allows processes usually carried out by people to be automated, it is in great demand in industrial sectors. The automation of these vehicles has been addressed in the literature, applying different machine learning strategies. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an automation framework that is frequently used to train autonomous agents. RL is a machine learning paradigm wherein an agent interacts with an environment to solve a given task. However, learning autonomously can be time consuming, computationally expensive, and may not be practical in highly-complex scenarios. Interactive reinforcement learning allows an external trainer to provide advice to an agent while it is learning a task. In this study, we set out to teach an RL agent to control a drone using reward-shaping and policy-shaping techniques simultaneously. Two simulated scenarios were proposed for the training; one without obstacles and one with obstacles. We also studied the influence of each technique. The results show that an agent trained simultaneously with both techniques obtains a lower reward than an agent trained using only a policy-based approach. Nevertheless, the agent achieves lower execution times and less dispersion during training.
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.
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.
In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework called GCOMB to learn algorithms that can solve combinatorial problems over large graphs. GCOMB mimics the greedy algorithm in the original problem and incrementally constructs a solution. The proposed framework utilizes Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to generate node embeddings that predicts the potential nodes in the solution set from the entire node set. These embeddings enable an efficient training process to learn the greedy policy via Q-learning. Through extensive evaluation on several real and synthetic datasets containing up to a million nodes, we establish that GCOMB is up to 41% better than the state of the art, up to seven times faster than the greedy algorithm, robust and scalable to large dynamic networks.
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.