Learning Environment Models with Continuous Stochastic Dynamics

Solving control tasks in complex environments automatically through learning offers great potential. While contemporary techniques from deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provide effective solutions, their decision-making is not transparent. We aim to provide insights into the decisions faced by the agent by learning an automaton model of environmental behavior under the control of an agent. However, for most control problems, automata learning is not scalable enough to learn a useful model. In this work, we raise the capabilities of automata learning such that it is possible to learn models for environments that have complex and continuous dynamics. The core of the scalability of our method lies in the computation of an abstract state-space representation, by applying dimensionality reduction and clustering on the observed environmental state space. The stochastic transitions are learned via passive automata learning from observed interactions of the agent and the environment. In an iterative model-based RL process, we sample additional trajectories to learn an accurate environment model in the form of a discrete-state Markov decision process (MDP). We apply our automata learning framework on popular RL benchmarking environments in the OpenAI Gym, including LunarLander, CartPole, Mountain Car, and Acrobot. Our results show that the learned models are so precise that they enable the computation of policies solving the respective control tasks. Yet the models are more concise and more general than neural-network-based policies and by using MDPs we benefit from a wealth of tools available for analyzing them. When solving the task of LunarLander, the learned model even achieved similar or higher rewards than deep RL policies learned with stable-baselines3.

On the Relationship Between RNN Hidden State Vectors and Semantic Ground Truth

We examine the assumption that the hidden-state vectors of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) tend to form clusters of semantically similar vectors, which we dub the clustering hypothesis. While this hypothesis has been assumed in the analysis of RNNs in recent years, its validity has not been studied thoroughly on modern neural network architectures. We examine the clustering hypothesis in the context of RNNs that were trained to recognize regular languages. This enables us to draw on perfect ground-truth automata in our evaluation, against which we can compare the RNN's accuracy and the distribution of the hidden-state vectors. We start with examining the (piecewise linear) separability of an RNN's hidden-state vectors into semantically different classes. We continue the analysis by computing clusters over the hidden-state vector space with multiple state-of-the-art unsupervised clustering approaches. We formally analyze the accuracy of computed clustering functions and the validity of the clustering hypothesis by determining whether clusters group semantically similar vectors to the same state in the ground-truth model. Our evaluation supports the validity of the clustering hypothesis in the majority of examined cases. We observed that the hidden-state vectors of well-trained RNNs are separable, and that the unsupervised clustering techniques succeed in finding clusters of similar state vectors.

Automata Learning meets Shielding

Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown environments. Our approach combines automata learning for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and shield synthesis in an iterative approach. Initially, the MDP representing the environment is unknown. The agent starts exploring the environment and collects traces. From the collected traces, we passively learn MDPs that abstractly represent the safety-relevant aspects of the environment. Given a learned MDP and a safety specification, we construct a shield. For each state-action pair within a learned MDP, the shield computes exact probabilities on how likely it is that executing the action results in violating the specification from the current state within the next $k$ steps. After the shield is constructed, the shield is used during runtime and blocks any actions that induce a too large risk from the agent. The shielded agent continues to explore the environment and collects new data on the environment. Iteratively, we use the collected data to learn new MDPs with higher accuracy, resulting in turn in shields able to prevent more safety violations. We implemented our approach and present a detailed case study of a Q-learning agent exploring slippery Gridworlds. In our experiments, we show that as the agent explores more and more of the environment during training, the improved learned models lead to shields that are able to prevent many safety violations.