No Arabic abstract
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents trained in a limited set of environments tend to suffer overfitting and fail to generalize to unseen testing environments. To improve their generalizability, data augmentation approaches (e.g. cutout and random convolution) are previously explored to increase the data diversity. However, we find these approaches only locally perturb the observations regardless of the training environments, showing limited effectiveness on enhancing the data diversity and the generalization performance. In this work, we introduce a simple approach, named mixreg, which trains agents on a mixture of observations from different training environments and imposes linearity constraints on the observation interpolations and the supervision (e.g. associated reward) interpolations. Mixreg increases the data diversity more effectively and helps learn smoother policies. We verify its effectiveness on improving generalization by conducting extensive experiments on the large-scale Procgen benchmark. Results show mixreg outperforms the well-established baselines on unseen testing environments by a large margin. Mixreg is simple, effective and general. It can be applied to both policy-based and value-based RL algorithms. Code is available at https://github.com/kaixin96/mixreg .
Biological evolution has distilled the experiences of many learners into the general learning algorithms of humans. Our novel meta reinforcement learning algorithm MetaGenRL is inspired by this process. MetaGenRL distills the experiences of many complex agents to meta-learn a low-complexity neural objective function that decides how future individuals will learn. Unlike recent meta-RL algorithms, MetaGenRL can generalize to new environments that are entirely different from those used for meta-training. In some cases, it even outperforms human-engineered RL algorithms. MetaGenRL uses off-policy second-order gradients during meta-training that greatly increase its sample efficiency.
Reinforcement learning systems require good representations to work well. For decades practical success in reinforcement learning was limited to small domains. Deep reinforcement learning systems, on the other hand, are scalable, not dependent on domain specific prior knowledge and have been successfully used to play Atari, in 3D navigation from pixels, and to control high degree of freedom robots. Unfortunately, the performance of deep reinforcement learning systems is sensitive to hyper-parameter settings and architecture choices. Even well tuned systems exhibit significant instability both within a trial and across experiment replications. In practice, significant expertise and trial and error are usually required to achieve good performance. One potential source of the problem is known as catastrophic interference: when later training decreases performance by overriding previous learning. Interestingly, the powerful generalization that makes Neural Networks (NN) so effective in batch supervised learning might explain the challenges when applying them in reinforcement learning tasks. In this paper, we explore how online NN training and interference interact in reinforcement learning. We find that simply re-mapping the input observations to a high-dimensional space improves learning speed and parameter sensitivity. We also show this preprocessing reduces interference in prediction tasks. More practically, we provide a simple approach to NN training that is easy to implement, and requires little additional computation. We demonstrate that our approach improves performance in both prediction and control with an extensive batch of experiments in classic control domains.
We introduce a new RL problem where the agent is required to generalize to a previously-unseen environment characterized by a subtask graph which describes a set of subtasks and their dependencies. Unlike existing hierarchical multitask RL approaches that explicitly describe what the agent should do at a high level, our problem only describes properties of subtasks and relationships among them, which requires the agent to perform complex reasoning to find the optimal subtask to execute. To solve this problem, we propose a neural subtask graph solver (NSGS) which encodes the subtask graph using a recursive neural network embedding. To overcome the difficulty of training, we propose a novel non-parametric gradient-based policy, graph reward propagation, to pre-train our NSGS agent and further finetune it through actor-critic method. The experimental results on two 2D visual domains show that our agent can perform complex reasoning to find a near-optimal way of executing the subtask graph and generalize well to the unseen subtask graphs. In addition, we compare our agent with a Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) method showing that our method is much more efficient than MCTS, and the performance of NSGS can be further improved by combining it with MCTS.
Several recent papers have examined generalization in reinforcement learning (RL), by proposing new environments or ways to add noise to existing environments, then benchmarking algorithms and model architectures on those environments. We discuss subtle conceptual properties of RL benchmarks that are not required in supervised learning (SL), and also properties that an RL benchmark should possess. Chief among them is one we call the principle of unchanged optimality: there should exist a single $pi$ that is optimal across all train and test tasks. In this work, we argue why this principle is important, and ways it can be broken or satisfied due to subtle choices in state representation or model architecture. We conclude by discussing challenges and future lines of research in theoretically analyzing generalization benchmarks.