Automated Rewards via LLM-Generated Progress Functions

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sarukkai, Vishnu, Shacklett, Brennan, Majercik, Zander, Bhatia, Kush, Ré, Christopher, Fatahalian, Kayvon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913563338080256
author Sarukkai, Vishnu
Shacklett, Brennan
Majercik, Zander
Bhatia, Kush
Ré, Christopher
Fatahalian, Kayvon
author_facet Sarukkai, Vishnu
Shacklett, Brennan
Majercik, Zander
Bhatia, Kush
Ré, Christopher
Fatahalian, Kayvon
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to automate reward engineering by leveraging their broad domain knowledge across various tasks. However, they often need many iterations of trial-and-error to generate effective reward functions. This process is costly because evaluating every sampled reward function requires completing the full policy optimization process for each function. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-driven reward generation framework that is able to produce state-of-the-art policies on the challenging Bi-DexHands benchmark with 20x fewer reward function samples than the prior state-of-the-art work. Our key insight is that we reduce the problem of generating task-specific rewards to the problem of coarsely estimating task progress. Our two-step solution leverages the task domain knowledge and the code synthesis abilities of LLMs to author progress functions that estimate task progress from a given state. Then, we use this notion of progress to discretize states, and generate count-based intrinsic rewards using the low-dimensional state space. We show that the combination of LLM-generated progress functions and count-based intrinsic rewards is essential for our performance gains, while alternatives such as generic hash-based counts or using progress directly as a reward function fall short.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_09187
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Rewards via LLM-Generated Progress Functions
Sarukkai, Vishnu
Shacklett, Brennan
Majercik, Zander
Bhatia, Kush
Ré, Christopher
Fatahalian, Kayvon
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to automate reward engineering by leveraging their broad domain knowledge across various tasks. However, they often need many iterations of trial-and-error to generate effective reward functions. This process is costly because evaluating every sampled reward function requires completing the full policy optimization process for each function. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-driven reward generation framework that is able to produce state-of-the-art policies on the challenging Bi-DexHands benchmark with 20x fewer reward function samples than the prior state-of-the-art work. Our key insight is that we reduce the problem of generating task-specific rewards to the problem of coarsely estimating task progress. Our two-step solution leverages the task domain knowledge and the code synthesis abilities of LLMs to author progress functions that estimate task progress from a given state. Then, we use this notion of progress to discretize states, and generate count-based intrinsic rewards using the low-dimensional state space. We show that the combination of LLM-generated progress functions and count-based intrinsic rewards is essential for our performance gains, while alternatives such as generic hash-based counts or using progress directly as a reward function fall short.
title Automated Rewards via LLM-Generated Progress Functions
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09187