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Register a new userThe MineRL 2019 Competition on Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning using Human Priors
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William Guss
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Though deep reinforcement learning has led to breakthroughs in many difficult domains, these successes have required an ever-increasing number of samples. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) systems require an exponentially increasing number of samples, their development is restricted to a continually shrinking segment of the AI community. Likewise, many of these systems cannot be applied to real-world problems, where environment samples are expensive. Resolution of these limitations requires new, sample-efficient methods. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce the MineRL Competition on Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning using Human Priors. The primary goal of the competition is to foster the development of algorithms which can efficiently leverage human demonstrations to drastically reduce the number of samples needed to solve complex, hierarchical, and sparse environments. To that end, we introduce: (1) the Minecraft ObtainDiamond task, a sequential decision making environment requiring long-term planning, hierarchical control, and efficient exploration methods; and (2) the MineRL-v0 dataset, a large-scale collection of over 60 million state-action pairs of human demonstrations that can be resimulated into embodied trajectories with arbitrary modifications to game state and visuals. Participants will compete to develop systems which solve the ObtainDiamond task with a limited number of samples from the environment simulator, Malmo. The competition is structured into two rounds in which competitors are provided several pair
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Although deep reinforcement learning has led to breakthroughs in many difficult domains, these successes have required an ever-increasing number of samples, affording only a shrinking segment of the AI community access to their development. Resolution of these limitations requires new, sample-efficient methods. To facilitate research in this direction, we propose this second iteration of the MineRL Competition. The primary goal of the competition is to foster the development of algorithms which can efficiently leverage human demonstrations to drastically reduce the number of samples needed to solve complex, hierarchical, and sparse environments. To that end, participants compete under a limited environment sample-complexity budget to develop systems which solve the MineRL ObtainDiamond task in Minecraft, a sequential decision making environment requiring long-term planning, hierarchical control, and efficient exploration methods. The competition is structured into two rounds in which competitors are provided several pair
The last decade has seen a significant increase of interest in deep learning research, with many public successes that have demonstrated its potential. As such, these systems are now being incorporated into commercial products. With this comes an additional challenge: how can we build AI systems that solve tasks where there is not a crisp, well-defined specification? While multiple solutions have been proposed, in this competition we focus on one in particular: learning from human feedback. Rather than training AI systems using a predefined reward function or using a labeled dataset with a predefined set of categories, we instead train the AI system using a learning signal derived from some form of human feedback, which can evolve over time as the understanding of the task changes, or as the capabilities of the AI system improve. The MineRL BASALT competition aims to spur forward research on this important class of techniques. We design a suite of four tasks in Minecraft for which we expect it will be hard to write down hardcoded reward functions. These tasks are defined by a paragraph of natural language: for example, create a waterfall and take a scenic picture of it, with additional clarifying details. Participants must train a separate agent for each task, using any method they want. Agents are then evaluated by humans who have read the task description. To help participants get started, we provide a dataset of human demonstrations on each of the four tasks, as well as an imitation learning baseline that leverages these demonstrations. Our hope is that this competition will improve our ability to build AI systems that do what their designers intend them to do, even when the intent cannot be easily formalized. Besides allowing AI to solve more tasks, this can also enable more effective regulation of AI systems, as well as making progress on the value alignment problem.
The aim of multi-task reinforcement learning is two-fold: (1) efficiently learn by training against multiple tasks and (2) quickly adapt, using limited samples, to a variety of new tasks. In this work, the tasks correspond to reward functions for environments with the same (or similar) dynamical models. We propose to learn a dynamical model during the training process and use this model to perform sample-efficient adaptation to new tasks at test time. We use significantly fewer samples by performing policy optimization only in a virtual environment whose transitions are given by our learned dynamical model. Our algorithm sequentially trains against several tasks. Upon encountering a new task, we first warm-up a policy on our learned dynamical model, which requires no new samples from the environment. We then adapt the dynamical model with samples from this policy in the real environment. We evaluate our approach on several continuous control benchmarks and demonstrate its efficacy over MAML, a state-of-the-art meta-learning algorithm, on these tasks.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is empirically successful in complex nonlinear Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces. By contrast, the majority of theoretical RL literature requires the MDP to satisfy some form of linear structure, in order to guarantee sample efficient RL. Such efforts typically assume the transition dynamics or value function of the MDP are described by linear functions of the state features. To resolve this discrepancy between theory and practice, we introduce the Effective Planning Window (EPW) condition, a structural condition on MDPs that makes no linearity assumptions. We demonstrate that the EPW condition permits sample efficient RL, by providing an algorithm which provably solves MDPs satisfying this condition. Our algorithm requires minimal assumptions on the policy class, which can include multi-layer neural networks with nonlinear activation functions. Notably, the EPW condition is directly motivated by popular gaming benchmarks, and we show that many classic Atari games satisfy this condition. We additionally show the necessity of conditions like EPW, by demonstrating that simple MDPs with slight nonlinearities cannot be solved sample efficiently.
Learning good representations is a long standing problem in reinforcement learning (RL). One of the conventional ways to achieve this goal in the supervised setting is through regularization of the parameters. Extending some of these ideas to the RL setting has not yielded similar improvements in learning. In this paper, we develop an online regularization framework for decorrelating features in RL and demonstrate its utility in several test environments. We prove that the proposed algorithm converges in the linear function approximation setting and does not change the main objective of maximizing cumulative reward. We demonstrate how to scale the approach to deep RL using the Gramian of the features achieving linear computational complexity in the number of features and squared complexity in size of the batch. We conduct an extensive empirical study of the new approach on Atari 2600 games and show a significant improvement in sample efficiency in 40 out of 49 games.
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