Towards Effective Context for Meta-Reinforcement Learning: an Approach based on Contrastive Learning
By Haotian Fu, Hongyao Tang, Jianye Hao, Chen Chen, Xidong Feng, Dong Li, Wulong Liu. 2020
61 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence
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In Artificial Intelligence
- Matthew Riemer
- Irina Rish
- Khimya Khetarpal
- Doina Precup
- Sergey Levine
- Joelle Pineau
- Eric Eaton
- Chelsea Finn
Citations in the corpus
- Towards Continual Reinforcement Learning: A Review and Perspectives (2020, background): “Current work also typically assumes a stationary task state distribution for meta-learning (Doshi-Velez and Konidaris, 2013; Wang et al., 2016; Duan et al., 2016; Zintgraf et al., 2018; Rakelly et al., 2019; Zintgraf et al., 2019; Humplik et al., 2019; Fakoor et al., 2019; Ortega et al., 2019; Perez”