No Arabic abstract
At an early age, human infants are able to learn and build a model of the world very quickly by constantly observing and interacting with objects around them. One of the most fundamental intuitions human infants acquire is intuitive physics. Human infants learn and develop these models, which later serve as prior knowledge for further learning. Inspired by such behaviors exhibited by human infants, we introduce a graphical physics network integrated with deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, we introduce an intrinsic reward normalization method that allows our agent to efficiently choose actions that can improve its intuitive physics model the most. Using a 3D physics engine, we show that our graphical physics network is able to infer objects positions and velocities very effectively, and our deep reinforcement learning network encourages an agent to improve its model by making it continuously interact with objects only using intrinsic motivation. We experiment our model in both stationary and non-stationary state problems and show benefits of our approach in terms of the number of different actions the agent performs and the accuracy of agents intuition model. Videos are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDbByp91r3M&t=2s
Imitation learning in a high-dimensional environment is challenging. Most inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods fail to outperform the demonstrator in such a high-dimensional environment, e.g., Atari domain. To address this challenge, we propose a novel reward learning module to generate intrinsic reward signals via a generative model. Our generative method can perform better forward state transition and backward action encoding, which improves the modules dynamics modeling ability in the environment. Thus, our module provides the imitation agent both the intrinsic intention of the demonstrator and a better exploration ability, which is critical for the agent to outperform the demonstrator. Empirical results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art IRL methods on multiple Atari games, even with one-life demonstration. Remarkably, our method achieves performance that is up to 5 times the performance of the demonstration.
We propose a unified mechanism for achieving coordination and communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), through rewarding agents for having causal influence over other agents actions. Causal influence is assessed using counterfactual reasoning. At each timestep, an agent simulates alternate actions that it could have taken, and computes their effect on the behavior of other agents. Actions that lead to bigger changes in other agents behavior are considered influential and are rewarded. We show that this is equivalent to rewarding agents for having high mutual information between their actions. Empirical results demonstrate that influence leads to enhanced coordination and communication in challenging social dilemma environments, dramatically increasing the learning curves of the deep RL agents, and leading to more meaningful learned communication protocols. The influence rewards for all agents can be computed in a decentralized way by enabling agents to learn a model of other agents using deep neural networks. In contrast, key previous works on emergent communication in the MARL setting were unable to learn diverse policies in a decentralized manner and had to resort to centralized training. Consequently, the influence reward opens up a window of new opportunities for research in this area.
Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted, they rely on heuristics and domain expertise. Alternate approaches that train neural networks to discover dense surrogate rewards avoid heuristics, but are high-dimensional, black-box solutions offering little interpretability. In this paper, we present a method that discovers dense rewards in the form of low-dimensional symbolic trees - thus making them more tractable for analysis. The trees use simple functional operators to map an agents observations to a scalar reward, which then supervises the policy gradient learning of a neural network policy. We test our method on continuous action spaces in Mujoco and discrete action spaces in Atari and Pygame environments. We show that the discovered dense rewards are an effective signal for an RL policy to solve the benchmark tasks. Notably, we significantly outperform a widely used, contemporary neural-network based reward-discovery algorithm in all environments considered.
We study the role of intrinsic motivation as an exploration bias for reinforcement learning in sparse-reward synergistic tasks, which are tasks where multiple agents must work together to achieve a goal they could not individually. Our key idea is that a good guiding principle for intrinsic motivation in synergistic tasks is to take actions which affect the world in ways that would not be achieved if the agents were acting on their own. Thus, we propose to incentivize agents to take (joint) actions whose effects cannot be predicted via a composition of the predicted effect for each individual agent. We study two instantiations of this idea, one based on the true states encountered, and another based on a dynamics model trained concurrently with the policy. While the former is simpler, the latter has the benefit of being analytically differentiable with respect to the action taken. We validate our approach in robotic bimanual manipulation and multi-agent locomotion tasks with sparse rewards; we find that our approach yields more efficient learning than both 1) training with only the sparse reward and 2) using the typical surprise-based formulation of intrinsic motivation, which does not bias toward synergistic behavior. Videos are available on the project webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/iclr2020-synergistic.
Making the right decision in traffic is a challenging task that is highly dependent on individual preferences as well as the surrounding environment. Therefore it is hard to model solely based on expert knowledge. In this work we use Deep Reinforcement Learning to learn maneuver decisions based on a compact semantic state representation. This ensures a consistent model of the environment across scenarios as well as a behavior adaptation function, enabling on-line changes of desired behaviors without re-training. The input for the neural network is a simulated object list similar to that of Radar or Lidar sensors, superimposed by a relational semantic scene description. The state as well as the reward are extended by a behavior adaptation function and a parameterization respectively. With little expert knowledge and a set of mid-level actions, it can be seen that the agent is capable to adhere to traffic rules and learns to drive safely in a variety of situations.