Task Aware Dreamer for Task Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ying, Chengyang, Zhou, Xinning, Hao, Zhongkai, Su, Hang, Liu, Songming, Yan, Dong, Zhu, Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Ying, Chengyang
Zhou, Xinning
Hao, Zhongkai
Su, Hang
Liu, Songming
Yan, Dong
Zhu, Jun
author_facet Ying, Chengyang
Zhou, Xinning
Hao, Zhongkai
Su, Hang
Liu, Songming
Yan, Dong
Zhu, Jun
contents A long-standing goal of reinforcement learning is to acquire agents that can learn on training tasks and generalize well on unseen tasks that may share a similar dynamic but with different reward functions. The ability to generalize across tasks is important as it determines an agent's adaptability to real-world scenarios where reward mechanisms might vary. In this work, we first show that training a general world model can utilize similar structures in these tasks and help train more generalizable agents. Extending world models into the task generalization setting, we introduce a novel method named Task Aware Dreamer (TAD), which integrates reward-informed features to identify consistent latent characteristics across tasks. Within TAD, we compute the variational lower bound of sample data log-likelihood, which introduces a new term designed to differentiate tasks using their states, as the optimization objective of our reward-informed world models. To demonstrate the advantages of the reward-informed policy in TAD, we introduce a new metric called Task Distribution Relevance (TDR) which quantitatively measures the relevance of different tasks. For tasks exhibiting a high TDR, i.e., the tasks differ significantly, we illustrate that Markovian policies struggle to distinguish them, thus it is necessary to utilize reward-informed policies in TAD. Extensive experiments in both image-based and state-based tasks show that TAD can significantly improve the performance of handling different tasks simultaneously, especially for those with high TDR, and display a strong generalization ability to unseen tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_05092
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Task Aware Dreamer for Task Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Ying, Chengyang
Zhou, Xinning
Hao, Zhongkai
Su, Hang
Liu, Songming
Yan, Dong
Zhu, Jun
Machine Learning
A long-standing goal of reinforcement learning is to acquire agents that can learn on training tasks and generalize well on unseen tasks that may share a similar dynamic but with different reward functions. The ability to generalize across tasks is important as it determines an agent's adaptability to real-world scenarios where reward mechanisms might vary. In this work, we first show that training a general world model can utilize similar structures in these tasks and help train more generalizable agents. Extending world models into the task generalization setting, we introduce a novel method named Task Aware Dreamer (TAD), which integrates reward-informed features to identify consistent latent characteristics across tasks. Within TAD, we compute the variational lower bound of sample data log-likelihood, which introduces a new term designed to differentiate tasks using their states, as the optimization objective of our reward-informed world models. To demonstrate the advantages of the reward-informed policy in TAD, we introduce a new metric called Task Distribution Relevance (TDR) which quantitatively measures the relevance of different tasks. For tasks exhibiting a high TDR, i.e., the tasks differ significantly, we illustrate that Markovian policies struggle to distinguish them, thus it is necessary to utilize reward-informed policies in TAD. Extensive experiments in both image-based and state-based tasks show that TAD can significantly improve the performance of handling different tasks simultaneously, especially for those with high TDR, and display a strong generalization ability to unseen tasks.
title Task Aware Dreamer for Task Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05092