Credit assignment in Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is still poorly understood. Existing methods either neglect credit assignment to pre-adaptation behavior or implement it naively. This leads to poor sample-efficiency during meta-training as well as ineffective task identification strategies. This paper provide…
Develops HMRL for sparse reward RL problems, improving meta policy efficiency and transferability.
problem Difficulty in learning meta policies for sparse reward RL problems.
method Hyper-Meta RL framework with cross-environment meta state embedding and shaped meta reward.
result Improves meta policy generalization and efficiency for sparse reward RL problems.
This paper introduces Meta-Q-Learning (MQL), a new off-policy algorithm for meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL). MQL builds upon three simple ideas. First, we show that Q-learning is competitive with state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms if given access to a context variable that is a representation of the past traject…
M3PO improves model-based meta-RL with theoretical guarantees.
problem Improving sample efficiency in multi-task RL with theoretical guarantees.
method Extending Janner et al. (2019) theorems, proposing M3PO with performance guarantees.
result M3PO outperforms existing methods in continuous-control benchmarks.
FLAP adapts policies quickly to new tasks using shared linear representations.
problem Adapting policies to new tasks efficiently and effectively.
method FLAP uses a shared linear representation and a separate adapter network for quick adaptation.
result FLAP achieves up to 8X faster adaptation and significantly better performance on out-of-distribution tasks.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated promising results on complex tasks, yet often require impractical numbers of samples since they learn from scratch. Meta-RL aims to address this challenge by leveraging experience from previous tasks so as to more quickly solve new tasks. However, in practice, th…
Most meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) methods learn to adapt to new tasks by directly optimizing the parameters of policies over primitive action space. Such algorithms work well in tasks with relatively slight difference. However, when the task distribution becomes wider, it would be quite inefficient to directly…
Paper introduces a meta-critic for accelerating off-policy actor-critic learning.
problem Improving sample efficiency in continuous control tasks.
method Meta-critic that meta-learns an additional loss for the actor.
result Online meta-critic learning leads to improved performance in various continuous control environments.
Meta-reinforcement learning improves fault-adaptive control efficiency.
problem Adaptive control under abrupt system faults with strict time constraints.
method Model-agnostic meta learning (MAML) with a fault library of prior policies.
result Improved sample efficiency and quick adaptation to new faults.
Meta-AAD uses deep reinforcement learning to improve anomaly detection by selecting the most informative instances.
problem High false-positive rate in anomaly detection, especially in high-stake applications.
method Meta-AAD leverages deep reinforcement learning to train a meta-policy for query selection, optimizing the number of discovered anomalies.
result Meta-AAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art re-ranking strategies and unsupervised baselines on 24 benchmark datasets.
State2vec improves RL by learning state embeddings that generalize across policies.
problem Inefficient generalization across policies in RL.
method Extends node2vec to learn state embeddings accounting for discounted future state transitions.
result Captures the geometry of the state space, leading to sample-efficient value function approximation.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience, several major challenges preclude their practicality. Current methods rely heavi…
Evolutionary Strategies optimize hyper-parameters for off-policy learning.
problem Hyper-parameter sensitivity in off-policy learning.
method Application of Evolutionary Strategies for online hyper-parameter tuning.
result Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Algorithm learns new tasks efficiently from past experience.
problem Lack of robustness to distributional shift in meta-reinforcement learning.
method Model Identification and Experience Relabeling (MIER) using dynamics models.
result Efficient extrapolation to out-of-distribution tasks.
Model-based reinforcement learning approaches carry the promise of being data efficient. However, due to challenges in learning dynamics models that sufficiently match the real-world dynamics, they struggle to achieve the same asymptotic performance as model-free methods. We propose Model-Based Meta-Policy-Optimization…
MAME models a separate exploration policy for faster adaptation.
problem Efficient exploration strategies for quick task adaptation in meta-reinforcement learning.
method Explicitly models a separate exploration policy for task distribution, using self-supervised or supervised learning objectives for adaptation.
result Superior performance compared to prior works in meta-reinforcement learning.
System interprets complex treatment effects for personalized policies.
problem Complex, hard-to-understand treatment effect models.
method Scalable, interpretable personalized experimentation system.
result Learned explanations and generated interpretable policies.
New method improves convergence of RL meta-learning.
problem Improving convergence in model-agnostic meta-reinforcement learning.
method Proposes Stochastic Gradient Meta-Reinforcement Learning (SG-MRL) to find ε-first-order stationary points. result Derives iteration and sample complexity for SG-MRL.
PS framework selects best policy from library for CSO problems.
problem Policy selection in CSO with heterogeneous performance across covariate space.
method PS framework constructs library of candidate policies and learns a meta-policy to select the best one.
result PS consistently outperforms best single policy in heterogeneous CSO problems.
Accelerates policy optimization in RL with optimistic and adaptive updates.
problem Improving policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning.
method Integrates foresight into policy improvement step via optimistic and adaptive updates.
result Designs an optimistic policy gradient algorithm, adaptive via meta-gradient learning.
ContraBAR uses contrastive learning to learn Bayes-optimal policies in RL.
problem Learning optimal policies for unknown tasks sampled from a known distribution.
method Proposes ContraBAR, a meta RL algorithm using contrastive predictive coding (CPC) for belief inference.
result ContraBAR achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods and is computationally efficient.
New meta-learning approach for bandit policies that achieve high average reward.
problem Designing bandit policies that balance between worst-case and Bayesian assumptions.
method Differentiable parameterized policies optimized using policy gradients.
result Proposed algorithm achieves low regret and is practical for various bandit problems.
In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning method in a reinforcement learning setting, based on evolution strategies (ES), exploration in parameter space and deterministic policy gradients. ES methods are easy to parallelize, which is desirable for modern training architectures; however, such methods typically req…
Policy-GNN optimizes GNN aggregation for diverse node iterations.
problem Optimizing GNN performance by varying aggregation iterations for different nodes.
method Policy-GNN uses a meta-policy framework with deep reinforcement learning to adaptively determine the number of aggregations for each node.
result Policy-GNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives on real-world datasets.
Novel meta-RL strategy improves efficiency in learning novel tasks.
problem Efficiency in learning novel tasks using deep RL.
method Decomposes meta-RL into task-exploration, task-inference, and task-fulfillment; uses deep networks and a task encoder.
result Improves sample efficiency and mitigates meta-overfitting.
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety issues whenever the learning process itself must be performed on a physical syste…
Meta-gradient RL learns to learn from experience.
problem Learning efficiency and adaptability in reinforcement learning.
method Meta-gradient descent to discover its own objective function.
result Meta-gradient RL adapts to learn more efficiently over time.
Meta-learning improves drone trajectory design for dynamic wireless networks.
problem Designing optimal trajectories for energy-constrained drones in dynamic network environments.
method Proposes a meta-learning algorithm to adaptively tune a reinforcement learning solution for trajectory design.
result Meta-tuned RL yields faster convergence and improved communication performance compared to baseline algorithms.
This paper proposes a system-agnostic policy for dynamic scheduling.
problem Dynamic scheduling in changing systems is challenging due to system-specific optimal policies.
method Descriptive policy that learns a system-agnostic scheduling principle.
result System-agnostic meta-learning enables adaptation to unseen system characteristics.
Reinforcement learning agents that operate in diverse and complex environments can benefit from the structured decomposition of their behavior. Often, this is addressed in the context of hierarchical reinforcement learning, where the aim is to decompose a policy into lower-level primitives or options, and a higher-leve…
Combines multiple OPE estimators into a more accurate and efficient estimate.
problem Offline evaluation of recommender systems using biased data.
method Meta-analysis of correlated OPE estimators, accounting for inter-estimator correlation.
result Improved statistical efficiency and accuracy in estimating policy value.
While recent progress has spawned very powerful machine learning systems, those agents remain extremely specialized and fail to transfer the knowledge they gain to similar yet unseen tasks. In this paper, we study a simple reinforcement learning problem and focus on learning policies that encode the proper invariances …
CCM improves context for Meta-RL by contrastive learning.
problem Improving context for Meta-RL to enable task generalization.
method CCM framework using contrastive learning for context encoding and information-gain-based trajectory collection.
result CCM outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in benchmarks and sparse-reward environments.
Beam search is widely used for approximate decoding in structured prediction problems. Models often use a beam at test time but ignore its existence at train time, and therefore do not explicitly learn how to use the beam. We develop an unifying meta-algorithm for learning beam search policies using imitation learning.…
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 th…
This paper bridges the gap between theoretical and practical OPE for bandit problems.
problem Estimating the value of a target policy from samples generated by different policies.
method Categorizing OPE situations based on evaluation policy properties, proposing a meta-algorithm.
result Meta-algorithm successfully bridges the gap between theoretical and practical OPE for bandit problems.
A method for Bayes-Adaptive Deep RL using meta-learning.
problem Maximizing expected return in unknown environments with uncertainty.
method variBAD: meta-learning for approximate inference and task uncertainty.
result variBAD achieves higher online return than existing methods in MuJoCo domains.
Meta-learning adjusts TD learning's eligibility trace parameter for more efficient reinforcement learning.
problem Efficiently tuning the eligibility trace parameter for temporal difference learning.
method Meta-learning method to adjust eligibility trace parameter state-dependently.
result Improves overall quality of update targets, minimizing target error.
Despite significant progress, deep reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from data-inefficiency and limited generalization. Recent efforts apply meta-learning to learn a meta-learner from a set of RL tasks such that a novel but related task could be solved quickly. Though specific in some ways, different tasks in meta-RL…
CausalCOMRL improves RL task representations by integrating causal relationships, enhancing generalizability.
problem Spurious correlations in context-based offline meta-reinforcement learning.
method CausalCOMRL integrates causal representation learning to uncover and incorporate causal relationships among task components.
result CausalCOMRL achieves better performance on meta-reinforcement learning benchmarks.
This work learns exploration policies for unknown distributions using samples and policy gradients.
problem Learning exploration policies for unknown distributions in Bayesian bandits.
method Meta-learning approach parameterizing policies in a differentiable way and optimizing them with policy gradients.
result Effective gradient estimators and variance reduction techniques are derived.
Efficiently adapting to new environments and changes in dynamics is critical for agents to successfully operate in the real world. Reinforcement learning (RL) based approaches typically rely on external reward feedback for adaptation. However, in many scenarios this reward signal might not be readily available for the …
Meta-agent learns effective exploration from offline data.
problem Design a meta-agent to quickly maximize reward in unseen tasks.
method Bayesian RL approach with adaptive neural belief estimate.
result Meta-agent learns effective exploration behavior from diverse tasks.
A new approach combines prior knowledge with learning to adapt quickly to new tasks.
problem Adapting quickly to new tasks using prior knowledge.
method Combines behavior prior, robust off-policy learning, and value function representation.
result Achieves competitive adaptation performance compared to meta reinforcement learning baselines.
Meta-learning for bandit tasks using shared representations.
problem Learning new bandit tasks efficiently using shared low-dimensional representations.
method Proposes a greedy policy to learn new bandit tasks leveraging a partially learned low-dimensional representation.
result Upper bound on regret of proposed policy, showing efficiency of learning new tasks.
New algorithm reduces decision switching in dynamic environments.
problem Online learning with memory and non-stationary environments.
method Dynamic policy regret, novel ensemble approach, meta-base decomposition.
result Proves optimal dynamic policy regret for memory length, non-stationarity, and time horizon.
A fundamental issue in reinforcement learning algorithms is the balance between exploration of the environment and exploitation of information already obtained by the agent. Especially, exploration has played a critical role for both efficiency and efficacy of the learning process. However, Existing works for explorati…
FOCAL tackles offline meta-reinforcement learning with efficient task inference and behavior regularization.
problem Efficiently adapt RL algorithms to unseen tasks without interactions, addressing bootstrapping errors and robust task inference.
method FOCAL combines behavior regularization, a deterministic context encoder, and a negative-power distance metric for efficient task inference.
result FOCAL outperforms prior algorithms on meta-RL benchmarks, demonstrating computational efficiency.