Exclusively Penalized Q-learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Constraint-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) involves policy constraints or imposing penalties on the value function to mitigate overestimation errors caused by distributional shift. This paper focuses on a limitation in existing offline RL methods with penalized value function, indicating the potential for underestimation bias due to unnecessary bias introduced in the value function. To address this concern, we propose Exclusively Penalized Q-learning (EPQ), which reduces estimation bias in the value function by selectively penalizing states that are prone to inducing estimation errors. Numerical results show that our method significantly reduces underestimation bias and improves performance in various offline control tasks compared to other offline RL methods

Domain Adaptive Imitation Learning with Visual Observation

In this paper, we consider domain-adaptive imitation learning with visual observation, where an agent in a target domain learns to perform a task by observing expert demonstrations in a source domain. Domain adaptive imitation learning arises in practical scenarios where a robot, receiving visual sensory data, needs to mimic movements by visually observing other robots from different angles or observing robots of different shapes. To overcome the domain shift in cross-domain imitation learning with visual observation, we propose a novel framework for extracting domain-independent behavioral features from input observations that can be used to train the learner, based on dual feature extraction and image reconstruction. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous algorithms for imitation learning from visual observation with domain shift.

FoX: Formation-aware exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning

Recently, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has gained significant popularity due to its success in various cooperative multi-agent tasks. However, exploration still remains a challenging problem in MARL due to the partial observability of the agents and the exploration space that can grow exponentially as the number of agents increases. Firstly, in order to address the scalability issue of the exploration space, we define a formation-based equivalence relation on the exploration space and aim to reduce the search space by exploring only meaningful states in different formations. Then, we propose a novel formation-aware exploration (FoX) framework that encourages partially observable agents to visit the states in diverse formations by guiding them to be well aware of their current formation solely based on their own observations. Numerical results show that the proposed FoX framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art MARL algorithms on Google Research Football (GRF) and sparse Starcraft II multi-agent challenge (SMAC) tasks.

Robust Imitation Learning against Variations in Environment Dynamics

In this paper, we propose a robust imitation learning (IL) framework that improves the robustness of IL when environment dynamics are perturbed. The existing IL framework trained in a single environment can catastrophically fail with perturbations in environment dynamics because it does not capture the situation that underlying environment dynamics can be changed. Our framework effectively deals with environments with varying dynamics by imitating multiple experts in sampled environment dynamics to enhance the robustness in general variations in environment dynamics. In order to robustly imitate the multiple sample experts, we minimize the risk with respect to the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the agent's policy and each of the sample experts. Numerical results show that our algorithm significantly improves robustness against dynamics perturbations compared to conventional IL baselines.

A Max-Min Entropy Framework for Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we propose a max-min entropy framework for reinforcement learning (RL) to overcome the limitation of the maximum entropy RL framework in model-free sample-based learning. Whereas the maximum entropy RL framework guides learning for policies to reach states with high entropy in the future, the proposed max-min entropy framework aims to learn to visit states with low entropy and maximize the entropy of these low-entropy states to promote exploration. For general Markov decision processes (MDPs), an efficient algorithm is constructed under the proposed max-min entropy framework based on disentanglement of exploration and exploitation. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm yields drastic performance improvement over the current state-of-the-art RL algorithms.

A Reinforcement Learning Formulation of the Lyapunov Optimization: Application to Edge Computing Systems with Queue Stability

In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach to the Lyapunov optimization is considered to minimize the time-average penalty while maintaining queue stability. A proper construction of state and action spaces is provided to form a proper Markov decision process (MDP) for the Lyapunov optimization. A condition for the reward function of reinforcement learning (RL) for queue stability is derived. Based on the analysis and practical RL with reward discounting, a class of reward functions is proposed for the DRL-based approach to the Lyapunov optimization. The proposed DRL-based approach to the Lyapunov optimization does not required complicated optimization at each time step and operates with general non-convex and discontinuous penalty functions. Hence, it provides an alternative to the conventional drift-plus-penalty (DPP) algorithm for the Lyapunov optimization. The proposed DRL-based approach is applied to resource allocation in edge computing systems with queue stability and numerical results demonstrate its successful operation.

Cross-Domain Imitation Learning with a Dual Structure

In this paper, we consider cross-domain imitation learning (CDIL) in which an agent in a target domain learns a policy to perform well in the target domain by observing expert demonstrations in a source domain without accessing any reward function. In order to overcome the domain difference for imitation learning, we propose a dual-structured learning method. The proposed learning method extracts two feature vectors from each input observation such that one vector contains domain information and the other vector contains policy expertness information, and then enhances feature vectors by synthesizing new feature vectors containing both target-domain and policy expertness information. The proposed CDIL method is tested on several MuJoCo tasks where the domain difference is determined by image angles or colors. Numerical results show that the proposed method shows superior performance in CDIL to other existing algorithms and achieves almost the same performance as imitation learning without domain difference.

Diversity Actor-Critic: Sample-Aware Entropy Regularization for Sample-Efficient Exploration

Policy entropy regularization is commonly used for better exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, policy entropy regularization is sample-inefficient in off-policy learning since it does not take the distribution of previous samples stored in the replay buffer into account. In order to take advantage of the previous sample distribution from the replay buffer for sample-efficient exploration, we propose sample-aware entropy regularization which maximizes the entropy of weighted sum of the policy action distribution and the sample action distribution from the replay buffer. We formulate the problem of sample-aware entropy regularized policy iteration, prove its convergence, and provide a practical algorithm named diversity actor-critic (DAC) which is a generalization of soft actor-critic (SAC). Numerical results show that DAC outperforms SAC and other state-of-the-art RL algorithms.

Dimension-Wise Importance Sampling Weight Clipping for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

In importance sampling (IS)-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), IS weights are typically clipped to avoid large variance in learning. However, policy update from clipped statistics induces large bias in tasks with high action dimensions, and bias from clipping makes it difficult to reuse old samples with large IS weights. In this paper, we consider PPO, a representative on-policy algorithm, and propose its improvement by dimension-wise IS weight clipping which separately clips the IS weight of each action dimension to avoid large bias and adaptively controls the IS weight to bound policy update from the current policy. This new technique enables efficient learning for high action-dimensional tasks and reusing of old samples like in off-policy learning to increase the sample efficiency. Numerical results show that the proposed new algorithm outperforms PPO and other RL algorithms in various Open AI Gym tasks.

AMBER: Adaptive Multi-Batch Experience Replay for Continuous Action Control

In this paper, a new adaptive multi-batch experience replay scheme is proposed for proximal policy optimization (PPO) for continuous action control. On the contrary to original PPO, the proposed scheme uses the batch samples of past policies as well as the current policy for the update for the next policy, where the number of the used past batches is adaptively determined based on the oldness of the past batches measured by the average importance sampling (IS) weight. The new algorithm constructed by combining PPO with the proposed multi-batch experience replay scheme maintains the advantages of original PPO such as random mini-batch sampling and small bias due to low IS weights by storing the pre-computed advantages and values and adaptively determining the mini-batch size. Numerical results show that the proposed method significantly increases the speed and stability of convergence on various continuous control tasks compared to original PPO.