Value-based methods constitute a fundamental methodology in planning and deep reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose to exploit the underlying structures of the state-action value function, i.e., Q function, for both planning and deep RL. In particular, if the underlying system dynamics lead to some global structures of the Q function, one should be capable of inferring the function better by leveraging such structures. Specifically, we investigate the lowrank structure, which widely exists for big data matrices. We verify empirically the existence of low-rank Q functions in the context of control and deep RL tasks (Atari games). As our key contribution, by leveraging Matrix Estimation (ME) techniques, we propose a general framework to exploit the underlying low-rank structure in Q functions, leading to a more efficient planning procedure for classical control, and additionally, a simple scheme that can be applied to any value-based RL techniques to consistently achieve better performance on "low-rank" tasks. Extensive experiments on control tasks and Atari games confirm the efficacy of our approach.

A long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of function approximations and efficient learning algorithms that provide agents with fast training, robust learning , and high performance in complex environments. To this end, the use of prior knowledge, while promising, is often costly and, in essence, challenging to scale up. In contrast, we consider problem knowledge signals, that are any relevant indicator useful to solve a task, e.g., metrics of uncertainty or proactive prediction of future states. Our framework consists of predicting such complementary quantities associated with self-performance assessment and accurate expectations. Therefore, policy and value functions are no longer only optimized for a reward but are learned using environment-agnostic quantities. We propose a generally applicable framework for structuring reinforcement learning by injecting problem knowledge in policy gradient updates. In this paper: (a) We introduce MERL, our multi-head reinforcement learning framework for generalized auxiliary tasks. (b) We conduct experiments across a variety of standard benchmark environments. Our results show that MERL improves performance for on-and off-policy methods. (c) We show that MERL also improves transfer learning on a set of challenging tasks. (d) We investigate how our approach addresses the problem of reward sparsity and pushes the function approximations into a better-constrained parameter configuration.

Gradient-based temporal difference (GTD) algorithms are widely used in off-policy learning scenarios. Among them, the two time-scale TD with gradient correction (TDC) algorithm has been shown to have superior performance. In contrast to previous studies that characterized the non-asymptotic convergence rate of TDC only under identical and independently distributed (i.i.d.) data samples, we provide the first non-asymptotic convergence analysis for two time-scale TDC under a non-i.i.d.\ Markovian sample path and linear function approximation. We show that the two time-scale TDC can converge as fast as O(log t/(t^(2/3))) under diminishing stepsize, and can converge exponentially fast under constant stepsize, but at the cost of a non-vanishing error. We further propose a TDC algorithm with blockwisely diminishing stepsize, and show that it asymptotically converges with an arbitrarily small error at a blockwisely linear convergence rate. Our experiments demonstrate that such an algorithm converges as fast as TDC under constant stepsize, and still enjoys comparable accuracy as TDC under diminishing stepsize.

We propose RecSim, a configurable platform for authoring simulation environments for recommender systems (RSs) that naturally supports sequential interaction with users. RecSim allows the creation of new environments that reflect particular aspects of user behavior and item structure at a level of abstraction well-suited to pushing the limits of current reinforcement learning (RL) and RS techniques in sequential interactive recommendation problems. Environments can be easily configured that vary assumptions about: user preferences and item familiarity; user latent state and its dynamics; and choice models and other user response behavior. We outline how RecSim offers value to RL and RS researchers and practitioners, and how it can serve as a vehicle for academic-industrial collaboration.

A BSTRACT We present GQSA T, a branching heuristic in a Boolean SA T solver trained with value-based reinforcement learning (RL) using Graph Neural Networks for function approximation. Solvers using GQSA T are complete SA T solvers that either provide a satisfying assignment or a proof of unsatisfiability, which is required for many SA T applications. The branching heuristic commonly used in SA T solvers today suffers from bad decisions during their warm-up period, whereas GQSA T has been trained to examine the structure of the particular problem instance to make better decisions at the beginning of the search. Training GQSA T is data efficient and does not require elaborate dataset preparation or feature engineering to train. We train GQSA T on small SA T problems using RL interfacing with an existing SA T solver. We show that GQSA T is able to reduce the number of iterations required to solve SA T problems by 2-3X, and it generalizes to unsatisfiable SA T instances, as well as to problems with 5X more variables than it was trained on. We also show that, to a lesser extent, it generalizes to SA T problems from different domains by evaluating it on graph coloring. Our experiments show that augmenting SA T solvers with agents trained with RL and graph neural networks can improve performance on the SA T search problem. 1 I NTRODUCTION Boolean satisfiability (SA T) is an important problem for both industry and academia impacting various fields, including circuit design, computer security, artificial intelligence, automatic theorem proving, and combinatorial optimization. As a result, modern SA T solvers are well-crafted, sophisticated, reliable pieces of software that can scale to problems with hundreds of thousands of variables (Ohrimenko et al., 2009). SA T is known to be NPcomplete (Karp, 1972), and most state-of-the-art open-source and commercial solvers rely on multiple heuristics to speed up the exhaustive search, which is otherwise intractable. These heuristics are usually meticulously crafted using expert domain knowledge and are often iterated on using trial and error. In this paper, we investigate how we can use machine learning to improve upon an existing branching heuristic without leveraging domain expertise.

In order to learn effectively, robots must be able to extract the intangible context by which task progress and mistakes are defined. In the domain of reinforcement learning, much of this information is provided by the reward function. Hence, reward shaping is a necessary part of how we can achieve state-of-the-art results on complex, multi-step tasks. However, comparatively little work has examined how reward shaping should be done so that it captures task context, particularly in scenarios where the task is long-horizon and failure is highly consequential. Our Schedule for Positive Task (SPOT) reward trains our Efficient Visual Task (EVT) model to solve problems that require an understanding of both task context and workspace constraints of multi-step block arrangement tasks. In simulation EVT can completely clear adversarial arrangements of objects by pushing and grasping in 99% of cases vs an 82% baseline in prior work. For random arrangements EVT clears 100% of test cases at 86% action efficiency vs 61% efficiency in prior work. EVT + SPOT is also able to demonstrate context understanding and complete stacks in 74% of trials compared to a baseline of 5% with EVT alone. To our knowledge, this is the first instance of a Reinforcement Learning based algorithm successfully completing such a challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/jhu-lcsr/good_robot .

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) aims to learn a dynamic model to reduce the number of interactions with real-world environments. However, due to estimation error, rollouts in the learned model, especially those of long horizon, fail to match the ones in real-world environments. This mismatching has seriously impacted the sample complexity of MBRL. The phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that previous works employ supervised learning to learn the one-step transition models, which has inherent difficulty ensuring the matching of distributions from multi-step rollouts. Based on the claim, we propose to learn the synthesized model by matching the distributions of multi-step rollouts sampled from the synthesized model and the real ones via WGAN. We theoretically show that matching the two can minimize the difference of cumulative rewards between the real transition and the learned one. Our experiments also show that the proposed model imitation method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of sample complexity and average return.

Quantifying the value of data is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Data valuation has multiple important use cases: (1) building insights about the learning task, (2) domain adaptation, (3) corrupted sample discovery, and (4) robust learning. To adaptively learn data values jointly with the target task predictor model, we propose a meta learning framework which we name Data Valuation using Reinforcement Learning (DVRL). We employ a data value estimator (modeled by a deep neural network) to learn how likely each datum is used in training of the predictor model. We train the data value estimator using a reinforcement signal of the reward obtained on a small validation set that reflects performance on the target task. We demonstrate that DVRL yields superior data value estimates compared to alternative methods across different types of datasets and in a diverse set of application scenarios. The corrupted sample discovery performance of DVRL is close to optimal in many regimes (i.e. as if the noisy samples were known apriori), and for domain adaptation and robust learning DVRL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art by 14.6% and 10.8%, respectively.

ROBEL is an open-source platform of cost-effective robots designed for reinforcement learning in the real world. ROBEL introduces two robots, each aimed to accelerate reinforcement learning research in different task domains: D'Claw is a three-fingered hand robot that facilitates learning dexterous manipulation tasks, and D'Kitty is a four-legged robot that facilitates learning agile legged locomotion tasks. These low-cost, modular robots are easy to maintain and are robust enough to sustain on-hardware reinforcement learning from scratch with over 14000 training hours registered on them to date. To leverage this platform, we propose an extensible set of continuous control benchmark tasks for each robot. These tasks feature dense and sparse task objectives, and additionally introduce score metrics as hardware-safety. We provide benchmark scores on an initial set of tasks using a variety of learning-based methods. Furthermore, we show that these results can be replicated across copies of the robots located in different institutions. Code, documentation, design files, detailed assembly instructions, final policies, baseline details, task videos, and all supplementary materials required to reproduce the results are available at www.roboticsbenchmarks.org.

We investigate the combination of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms with uniform large-scale experience replay and propose solutions for two challenges: (a) efficient actor-critic learning with experience replay (b) stability of very off-policy learning. We employ those insights to accelerate hyper-parameter sweeps in which all participating agents run concurrently and share their experience via a common replay module. To this end we analyze the bias-variance tradeoffs in V-trace, a form of importance sampling for actor-critic methods. Based on our analysis, we then argue for mixing experience sampled from replay with on-policy experience, and propose a new trust region scheme that scales effectively to data distributions where V-trace becomes unstable. We provide extensive empirical validation of the proposed solution. We further show the benefits of this setup by demonstrating state-of-the-art data efficiency on Atari among agents trained up until 200M environment frames.