Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userContrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
79
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Rishabh Agarwal
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Reinforcement learning methods trained on few environments rarely learn policies that generalize to unseen environments. To improve generalization, we incorporate the inherent sequential structure in reinforcement learning into the representation learning process. This approach is orthogonal to recent approaches, which rarely exploit this structure explicitly. Specifically, we introduce a theoretically motivated policy similarity metric (PSM) for measuring behavioral similarity between states. PSM assigns high similarity to states for which the optimal policies in those states as well as in future states are similar. We also present a contrastive representation learning procedure to embed any state similarity metric, which we instantiate with PSM to obtain policy similarity embeddings (PSEs). We demonstrate that PSEs improve generalization on diverse benchmarks, including LQR with spurious correlations, a jumping task from pixels, and Distracting DM Control Suite.
rate research
Read More
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 .
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.
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.
Context, the embedding of previous collected trajectories, is a powerful construct for Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) algorithms. By conditioning on an effective context, Meta-RL policies can easily generalize to new tasks within a few adaptation steps. We argue that improving the quality of context involves answering two questions: 1. How to train a compact and sufficient encoder that can embed the task-specific information contained in prior trajectories? 2. How to collect informative trajectories of which the corresponding context reflects the specification of tasks? To this end, we propose a novel Meta-RL framework called CCM (Contrastive learning augmented Context-based Meta-RL). We first focus on the contrastive nature behind different tasks and leverage it to train a compact and sufficient context encoder. Further, we train a separate exploration policy and theoretically derive a new information-gain-based objective which aims to collect informative trajectories in a few steps. Empirically, we evaluate our approaches on common benchmarks as well as several complex sparse-reward environments. The experimental results show that CCM outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by addressing previously mentioned problems respectively.
Standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms use a shared representation for the policy and value function, especially when training directly from images. However, we argue that more information is needed to accurately estimate the value function than to learn the optimal policy. Consequently, the use of a shared representation for the policy and value function can lead to overfitting. To alleviate this problem, we propose two approaches which are combined to create IDAAC: Invariant Decoupled Advantage Actor-Critic. First, IDAAC decouples the optimization of the policy and value function, using separate networks to model them. Second, it introduces an auxiliary loss which encourages the representation to be invariant to task-irrelevant properties of the environment. IDAAC shows good generalization to unseen environments, achieving a new state-of-the-art on the Procgen benchmark and outperforming popular methods on DeepMind Control tasks with distractors. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/rraileanu/idaac.
suggested questions
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
