Compositional Automata Embeddings for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yalcinkaya, Beyazit, Lauffer, Niklas, Vazquez-Chanlatte, Marcell, Seshia, Sanjit A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yalcinkaya, Beyazit
Lauffer, Niklas
Vazquez-Chanlatte, Marcell
Seshia, Sanjit A.
author_facet Yalcinkaya, Beyazit
Lauffer, Niklas
Vazquez-Chanlatte, Marcell
Seshia, Sanjit A.
contents Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning is a powerful way to control an AI agent's behavior at runtime. That said, popular goal representations, e.g., target states or natural language, are either limited to Markovian tasks or rely on ambiguous task semantics. We propose representing temporal goals using compositions of deterministic finite automata (cDFAs) and use cDFAs to guide RL agents. cDFAs balance the need for formal temporal semantics with ease of interpretation: if one can understand a flow chart, one can understand a cDFA. On the other hand, cDFAs form a countably infinite concept class with Boolean semantics, and subtle changes to the automaton can result in very different tasks, making them difficult to condition agent behavior on. To address this, we observe that all paths through a DFA correspond to a series of reach-avoid tasks and propose pre-training graph neural network embeddings on "reach-avoid derived" DFAs. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed pre-training method enables zero-shot generalization to various cDFA task classes and accelerated policy specialization without the myopic suboptimality of hierarchical methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_00205
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Compositional Automata Embeddings for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Yalcinkaya, Beyazit
Lauffer, Niklas
Vazquez-Chanlatte, Marcell
Seshia, Sanjit A.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning is a powerful way to control an AI agent's behavior at runtime. That said, popular goal representations, e.g., target states or natural language, are either limited to Markovian tasks or rely on ambiguous task semantics. We propose representing temporal goals using compositions of deterministic finite automata (cDFAs) and use cDFAs to guide RL agents. cDFAs balance the need for formal temporal semantics with ease of interpretation: if one can understand a flow chart, one can understand a cDFA. On the other hand, cDFAs form a countably infinite concept class with Boolean semantics, and subtle changes to the automaton can result in very different tasks, making them difficult to condition agent behavior on. To address this, we observe that all paths through a DFA correspond to a series of reach-avoid tasks and propose pre-training graph neural network embeddings on "reach-avoid derived" DFAs. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed pre-training method enables zero-shot generalization to various cDFA task classes and accelerated policy specialization without the myopic suboptimality of hierarchical methods.
title Compositional Automata Embeddings for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00205