Upside Down Reinforcement Learning with Policy Generators

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Main Authors: Di Ventura, Jacopo, Ashley, Dylan R., Herrmann, Vincent, Faccio, Francesco, Schmidhuber, Jürgen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866910802225659904
author Di Ventura, Jacopo
Ashley, Dylan R.
Herrmann, Vincent
Faccio, Francesco
Schmidhuber, Jürgen
author_facet Di Ventura, Jacopo
Ashley, Dylan R.
Herrmann, Vincent
Faccio, Francesco
Schmidhuber, Jürgen
contents Upside Down Reinforcement Learning (UDRL) is a promising framework for solving reinforcement learning problems which focuses on learning command-conditioned policies. In this work, we extend UDRL to the task of learning a command-conditioned generator of deep neural network policies. We accomplish this using Hypernetworks - a variant of Fast Weight Programmers, which learn to decode input commands representing a desired expected return into command-specific weight matrices. Our method, dubbed Upside Down Reinforcement Learning with Policy Generators (UDRLPG), streamlines comparable techniques by removing the need for an evaluator or critic to update the weights of the generator. To counteract the increased variance in last returns caused by not having an evaluator, we decouple the sampling probability of the buffer from the absolute number of policies in it, which, together with a simple weighting strategy, improves the empirical convergence of the algorithm. Compared with existing algorithms, UDRLPG achieves competitive performance and high returns, sometimes outperforming more complex architectures. Our experiments show that a trained generator can generalize to create policies that achieve unseen returns zero-shot. The proposed method appears to be effective in mitigating some of the challenges associated with learning highly multimodal functions. Altogether, we believe that UDRLPG represents a promising step forward in achieving greater empirical sample efficiency in RL. A full implementation of UDRLPG is publicly available at https://github.com/JacopoD/udrlpg_
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_16288
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Upside Down Reinforcement Learning with Policy Generators
Di Ventura, Jacopo
Ashley, Dylan R.
Herrmann, Vincent
Faccio, Francesco
Schmidhuber, Jürgen
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
68T07
I.2.6
Upside Down Reinforcement Learning (UDRL) is a promising framework for solving reinforcement learning problems which focuses on learning command-conditioned policies. In this work, we extend UDRL to the task of learning a command-conditioned generator of deep neural network policies. We accomplish this using Hypernetworks - a variant of Fast Weight Programmers, which learn to decode input commands representing a desired expected return into command-specific weight matrices. Our method, dubbed Upside Down Reinforcement Learning with Policy Generators (UDRLPG), streamlines comparable techniques by removing the need for an evaluator or critic to update the weights of the generator. To counteract the increased variance in last returns caused by not having an evaluator, we decouple the sampling probability of the buffer from the absolute number of policies in it, which, together with a simple weighting strategy, improves the empirical convergence of the algorithm. Compared with existing algorithms, UDRLPG achieves competitive performance and high returns, sometimes outperforming more complex architectures. Our experiments show that a trained generator can generalize to create policies that achieve unseen returns zero-shot. The proposed method appears to be effective in mitigating some of the challenges associated with learning highly multimodal functions. Altogether, we believe that UDRLPG represents a promising step forward in achieving greater empirical sample efficiency in RL. A full implementation of UDRLPG is publicly available at https://github.com/JacopoD/udrlpg_
title Upside Down Reinforcement Learning with Policy Generators
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
68T07
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16288