Contrastive UCB: Provably Efficient Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning in Online Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qiu, Shuang, Wang, Lingxiao, Bai, Chenjia, Yang, Zhuoran, Wang, Zhaoran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Qiu, Shuang
Wang, Lingxiao
Bai, Chenjia
Yang, Zhuoran
Wang, Zhaoran
author_facet Qiu, Shuang
Wang, Lingxiao
Bai, Chenjia
Yang, Zhuoran
Wang, Zhaoran
contents In view of its power in extracting feature representation, contrastive self-supervised learning has been successfully integrated into the practice of (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), leading to efficient policy learning in various applications. Despite its tremendous empirical successes, the understanding of contrastive learning for RL remains elusive. To narrow such a gap, we study how RL can be empowered by contrastive learning in a class of Markov decision processes (MDPs) and Markov games (MGs) with low-rank transitions. For both models, we propose to extract the correct feature representations of the low-rank model by minimizing a contrastive loss. Moreover, under the online setting, we propose novel upper confidence bound (UCB)-type algorithms that incorporate such a contrastive loss with online RL algorithms for MDPs or MGs. We further theoretically prove that our algorithm recovers the true representations and simultaneously achieves sample efficiency in learning the optimal policy and Nash equilibrium in MDPs and MGs. We also provide empirical studies to demonstrate the efficacy of the UCB-based contrastive learning method for RL. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first provably efficient online RL algorithm that incorporates contrastive learning for representation learning. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Baichenjia/Contrastive-UCB.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2207_14800
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contrastive UCB: Provably Efficient Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning in Online Reinforcement Learning
Qiu, Shuang
Wang, Lingxiao
Bai, Chenjia
Yang, Zhuoran
Wang, Zhaoran
Machine Learning
In view of its power in extracting feature representation, contrastive self-supervised learning has been successfully integrated into the practice of (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), leading to efficient policy learning in various applications. Despite its tremendous empirical successes, the understanding of contrastive learning for RL remains elusive. To narrow such a gap, we study how RL can be empowered by contrastive learning in a class of Markov decision processes (MDPs) and Markov games (MGs) with low-rank transitions. For both models, we propose to extract the correct feature representations of the low-rank model by minimizing a contrastive loss. Moreover, under the online setting, we propose novel upper confidence bound (UCB)-type algorithms that incorporate such a contrastive loss with online RL algorithms for MDPs or MGs. We further theoretically prove that our algorithm recovers the true representations and simultaneously achieves sample efficiency in learning the optimal policy and Nash equilibrium in MDPs and MGs. We also provide empirical studies to demonstrate the efficacy of the UCB-based contrastive learning method for RL. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first provably efficient online RL algorithm that incorporates contrastive learning for representation learning. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Baichenjia/Contrastive-UCB.
title Contrastive UCB: Provably Efficient Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning in Online Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.14800