Continual Task Learning through Adaptive Policy Self-Composition

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hu, Shengchao, Zhou, Yuhang, Fan, Ziqing, Hu, Jifeng, Shen, Li, Zhang, Ya, Tao, Dacheng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Hu, Shengchao
Zhou, Yuhang
Fan, Ziqing
Hu, Jifeng
Shen, Li
Zhang, Ya
Tao, Dacheng
author_facet Hu, Shengchao
Zhou, Yuhang
Fan, Ziqing
Hu, Jifeng
Shen, Li
Zhang, Ya
Tao, Dacheng
contents Training a generalizable agent to continually learn a sequence of tasks from offline trajectories is a natural requirement for long-lived agents, yet remains a significant challenge for current offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Specifically, an agent must be able to rapidly adapt to new tasks using newly collected trajectories (plasticity), while retaining knowledge from previously learned tasks (stability). However, systematic analyses of this setting are scarce, and it remains unclear whether conventional continual learning (CL) methods are effective in continual offline RL (CORL) scenarios. In this study, we develop the Offline Continual World benchmark and demonstrate that traditional CL methods struggle with catastrophic forgetting, primarily due to the unique distribution shifts inherent to CORL scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce CompoFormer, a structure-based continual transformer model that adaptively composes previous policies via a meta-policy network. Upon encountering a new task, CompoFormer leverages semantic correlations to selectively integrate relevant prior policies alongside newly trained parameters, thereby enhancing knowledge sharing and accelerating the learning process. Our experiments reveal that CompoFormer outperforms conventional CL methods, particularly in longer task sequences, showcasing a promising balance between plasticity and stability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_11364
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Task Learning through Adaptive Policy Self-Composition
Hu, Shengchao
Zhou, Yuhang
Fan, Ziqing
Hu, Jifeng
Shen, Li
Zhang, Ya
Tao, Dacheng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Training a generalizable agent to continually learn a sequence of tasks from offline trajectories is a natural requirement for long-lived agents, yet remains a significant challenge for current offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Specifically, an agent must be able to rapidly adapt to new tasks using newly collected trajectories (plasticity), while retaining knowledge from previously learned tasks (stability). However, systematic analyses of this setting are scarce, and it remains unclear whether conventional continual learning (CL) methods are effective in continual offline RL (CORL) scenarios. In this study, we develop the Offline Continual World benchmark and demonstrate that traditional CL methods struggle with catastrophic forgetting, primarily due to the unique distribution shifts inherent to CORL scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce CompoFormer, a structure-based continual transformer model that adaptively composes previous policies via a meta-policy network. Upon encountering a new task, CompoFormer leverages semantic correlations to selectively integrate relevant prior policies alongside newly trained parameters, thereby enhancing knowledge sharing and accelerating the learning process. Our experiments reveal that CompoFormer outperforms conventional CL methods, particularly in longer task sequences, showcasing a promising balance between plasticity and stability.
title Continual Task Learning through Adaptive Policy Self-Composition
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.11364