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Register a new userInformation Directed Reward Learning for Reinforcement Learning
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David Lindner
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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For many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, specifying a reward is difficult. In this paper, we consider an RL setting where the agent can obtain information about the reward only by querying an expert that can, for example, evaluate individual states or provide binary preferences over trajectories. From such expensive feedback, we aim to learn a model of the reward function that allows standard RL algorithms to achieve high expected return with as few expert queries as possible. For this purpose, we propose Information Directed Reward Learning (IDRL), which uses a Bayesian model of the reward function and selects queries that maximize the information gain about the difference in return between potentially optimal policies. In contrast to prior active reward learning methods designed for specific types of queries, IDRL naturally accommodates different query types. Moreover, by shifting the focus from reducing the reward approximation error to improving the policy induced by the reward model, it achieves similar or better performance with significantly fewer queries. We support our findings with extensive evaluations in multiple environments and with different types of queries.
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In offline reinforcement learning (RL) agents are trained using a logged dataset. It appears to be the most natural route to attack real-life applications because in domains such as healthcare and robotics interactions with the environment are either expensive or unethical. Training agents usually requires reward functions, but unfortunately, rewards are seldom available in practice and their engineering is challenging and laborious. To overcome this, we investigate reward learning under the constraint of minimizing human reward annotations. We consider two types of supervision: timestep annotations and demonstrations. We propose semi-supervised learning algorithms that learn from limited annotations and incorporate unlabelled data. In our experiments with a simulated robotic arm, we greatly improve upon behavioural cloning and closely approach the performance achieved with ground truth rewards. We further investigate the relationship between the quality of the reward model and the final policies. We notice, for example, that the reward models do not need to be perfect to result in useful policies.
Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have specific properties that can be leveraged to modify existing RL algorithms to adapt to those tasks and further improve performance, and a general class of such properties is the multiple reward channel. In those environments the full reward can be decomposed into sub-rewards obtained from different channels. Existing work on reward decomposition either requires prior knowledge of the environment to decompose the full reward, or decomposes reward without prior knowledge but with degraded performance. In this paper, we propose Distributional Reward Decomposition for Reinforcement Learning (DRDRL), a novel reward decomposition algorithm which captures the multiple reward channel structure under distributional setting. Empirically, our method captures the multi-channel structure and discovers meaningful reward decomposition, without any requirements on prior knowledge. Consequently, our agent achieves better performance than existing methods on environments with multiple reward channels.
One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is generalisation. In typical deep RL methods this is achieved by approximating the optimal value function with a low-dimensional representation using a deep network. While this approach works well in many domains, in domains where the optimal value function cannot easily be reduced to a low-dimensional representation, learning can be very slow and unstable. This paper contributes towards tackling such challenging domains, by proposing a new method, called Hybrid Reward Architecture (HRA). HRA takes as input a decomposed reward function and learns a separate value function for each component reward function. Because each component typically only depends on a subset of all features, the corresponding value function can be approximated more easily by a low-dimensional representation, enabling more effective learning. We demonstrate HRA on a toy-problem and the Atari game Ms. Pac-Man, where HRA achieves above-human performance.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically deal with maximizing the expected cumulative return (discounted or undiscounted, finite or infinite horizon). However, several crucial applications in the real world, such as drug discovery, do not fit within this framework because an RL agent only needs to identify states (molecules) that achieve the highest reward within a trajectory and does not need to optimize for the expected cumulative return. In this work, we formulate an objective function to maximize the expected maximum reward along a trajectory, derive a novel functional form of the Bellman equation, introduce the corresponding Bellman operators, and provide a proof of convergence. Using this formulation, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the task of molecule generation that mimics a real-world drug discovery pipeline.
The Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate (RBMLE) for adaptive control of Markov chains was proposed to overcome the central obstacle of what is variously called the fundamental closed-identifiability problem of adaptive control, the dual control problem, or, contemporaneously, the exploration vs. exploitation problem. It exploited the key observation that since the maximum likelihood parameter estimator can asymptotically identify the closed-transition probabilities under a certainty equivalent approach, the limiting parameter estimates must necessarily have an optimal reward that is less than the optimal reward attainable for the true but unknown system. Hence it proposed a counteracting reverse bias in favor of parameters with larger optimal rewards, providing a solution to the fundamental problem alluded to above. It thereby proposed an optimistic approach of favoring parameters with larger optimal rewards, now known as optimism in the face of uncertainty. The RBMLE approach has been proved to be long-term average reward optimal in a variety of contexts. However, modern attention is focused on the much finer notion of regret, or finite-time performance. Recent analysis of RBMLE for multi-armed stochastic bandits and linear contextual bandits has shown that it not only has state-of-the-art regret, but it also exhibits empirical performance comparable to or better than the best current contenders, and leads to strikingly simple index policies. Motivated by this, we examine the finite-time performance of RBMLE for reinforcement learning tasks that involve the general problem of optimal control of unknown Markov Decision Processes. We show that it has a regret of $mathcal{O}( log T)$ over a time horizon of $T$ steps, similar to state-of-the-art algorithms. Simulation studies show that RBMLE outperforms other algorithms such as UCRL2 and Thompson Sampling.
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