Overestimation in single-agent reinforcement learning has been extensively studied. In contrast, overestimation in the multiagent setting has received comparatively little attention although it increases with the number of agents and leads to severe learning instability. Previous works concentrate on reducing overestimation in the estimation process of target Q-value. They ignore the follow-up optimization process of online Q-network, thus making it hard to fully address the complex multiagent overestimation problem. To solve this challenge, in this study, we first establish an iterative estimation-optimization analysis framework for multiagent value-mixing Q-learning. Our analysis reveals that multiagent overestimation not only comes from the computation of target Q-value but also accumulates in the online Q-network's optimization. Motivated by it, we propose the Dual Ensembled Multiagent Q-Learning with Hypernet Regularizer algorithm to tackle multiagent overestimation from two aspects. First, we extend the random ensemble technique into the estimation of target individual and global Q-values to derive a lower update target. Second, we propose a novel hypernet regularizer on hypernetwork weights and biases to constrain the optimization of online global Q-network to prevent overestimation accumulation. Extensive experiments in MPE and SMAC show that the proposed method successfully addresses overestimation across various tasks.

This paper explores the use of model-based offline reinforcement learning with long model rollouts. While some literature criticizes this approach due to compounding errors, many practitioners have found success in real-world applications. The paper aims to demonstrate that long rollouts do not necessarily result in exponentially growing errors and can actually produce better Q-value estimates than model-free methods. These findings can potentially enhance reinforcement learning techniques.

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) methods such as RL$^2$ have emerged as promising approaches for learning data-efficient RL algorithms tailored to a given task distribution. However, these RL algorithms struggle with long-horizon tasks and out-of-distribution tasks since they rely on recurrent neural networks to process the sequence of experiences instead of summarizing them into general RL components such as value functions. Moreover, even transformers have a practical limit to the length of histories they can efficiently reason about before training and inference costs become prohibitive. In contrast, traditional RL algorithms are data-inefficient since they do not leverage domain knowledge, but they do converge to an optimal policy as more data becomes available. In this paper, we propose RL$^3$, a principled hybrid approach that combines traditional RL and meta-RL by incorporating task-specific action-values learned through traditional RL as an input to the meta-RL neural network. We show that RL$^3$ earns greater cumulative reward on long-horizon and out-of-distribution tasks compared to RL$^2$, while maintaining the efficiency of the latter in the short term. Experiments are conducted on both custom and benchmark discrete domains from the meta-RL literature that exhibit a range of short-term, long-term, and complex dependencies.

Offline reinforcement learning agents seek optimal policies from fixed data sets. With environmental interaction prohibited, agents face significant challenges in preventing errors in value estimates from compounding and subsequently causing the learning process to collapse. Uncertainty estimation using ensembles compensates for this by penalising high-variance value estimates, allowing agents to learn robust policies based on data-driven actions. However, the requirement for large ensembles to facilitate sufficient penalisation results in significant computational overhead. In this work, we examine the role of policy constraints as a mechanism for regulating uncertainty, and the corresponding balance between level of constraint and ensemble size. By incorporating behavioural cloning into policy updates, we show empirically that sufficient penalisation can be achieved with a much smaller ensemble size, substantially reducing computational demand while retaining state-of-the-art performance on benchmarking tasks. Furthermore, we show how such an approach can facilitate stable online fine tuning, allowing for continued policy improvement while avoiding severe performance drops.

Approximation of the value functions in value-based deep reinforcement learning systems induces overestimation bias, resulting in suboptimal policies. We show that when the reinforcement signals received by the agents have a high variance, deep actor-critic approaches that overcome the overestimation bias lead to a substantial underestimation bias. We introduce a parameter-free, novel deep Q-learning variant to reduce this underestimation bias for continuous control. By obtaining fixed weights in computing the critic objective as a linear combination of the approximate critic functions, our Q-value update rule integrates the concepts of Clipped Double Q-learning and Maxmin Q-learning. We test the performance of our improvement on a set of MuJoCo and Box2D continuous control tasks and find that it improves the state-of-the-art and outperforms the baseline algorithms in the majority of the environments.

Target networks are at the core of recent success in Reinforcement Learning. They stabilize the training by using old parameters to estimate the $Q$-values, but this also limits the propagation of newly-encountered rewards which could ultimately slow down the training. In this work, we propose an alternative training method based on functional regularization which does not have this deficiency. Unlike target networks, our method uses up-to-date parameters to estimate the target $Q$-values, thereby speeding up training while maintaining stability. Surprisingly, in some cases, we can show that target networks are a special, restricted type of functional regularizers. Using this approach, we show empirical improvements in sample efficiency and performance across a range of Atari and simulated robotics environments.

Designing a multi-layer optical system with designated optical characteristics is an inverse design problem in which the resulting design is determined by several discrete and continuous parameters. In particular, we consider three design parameters to describe a multi-layer stack: Each layer's dielectric material and thickness as well as the total number of layers. Such a combination of both, discrete and continuous parameters is a challenging optimization problem that often requires a computationally expensive search for an optimal system design. Hence, most methods merely determine the optimal thicknesses of the system's layers. To incorporate layer material and the total number of layers as well, we propose a method that considers the stacking of consecutive layers as parameterized actions in a Markov decision process. We propose an exponentially transformed reward signal that eases policy optimization and adapt a recent variant of Q-learning for inverse design optimization. We demonstrate that our method outperforms human experts and a naive reinforcement learning algorithm concerning the achieved optical characteristics. Moreover, the learned Q-values contain information about the optical properties of multi-layer optical systems, thereby allowing physical interpretation or what-if analysis.

Given access to accurate dynamical models, modern planning approaches are effective in computing feasible and optimal plans for repetitive robotic tasks. However, it is difficult to model the true dynamics of the real world before execution, especially for tasks requiring interactions with objects whose parameters are unknown. A recent planning approach, CMAX, tackles this problem by adapting the planner online during execution to bias the resulting plans away from inaccurately modeled regions. CMAX, while being provably guaranteed to reach the goal, requires strong assumptions on the accuracy of the model used for planning and fails to improve the quality of the solution over repetitions of the same task. In this paper we propose CMAX++, an approach that leverages real-world experience to improve the quality of resulting plans over successive repetitions of a robotic task. CMAX++ achieves this by integrating model-free learning using acquired experience with model-based planning using the potentially inaccurate model. We provide provable guarantees on the completeness and asymptotic convergence of CMAX++ to the optimal path cost as the number of repetitions increases. CMAX++ is also shown to outperform baselines in simulated robotic tasks including 3D mobile robot navigation where the track friction is incorrectly modeled, and a 7D pick-and-place task where the mass of the object is unknown leading to discrepancy between true and modeled dynamics.

Optimistic initialisation is an effective strategy for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular case, all provably efficient model-free algorithms rely on it. However, model-free deep RL algorithms do not use optimistic initialisation despite taking inspiration from these provably efficient tabular algorithms. In particular, in scenarios with only positive rewards, Q-values are initialised at their lowest possible values due to commonly used network initialisation schemes, a pessimistic initialisation. Merely initialising the network to output optimistic Q-values is not enough, since we cannot ensure that they remain optimistic for novel state-action pairs, which is crucial for exploration. We propose a simple count-based augmentation to pessimistically initialised Q-values that separates the source of optimism from the neural network. We show that this scheme is provably efficient in the tabular setting and extend it to the deep RL setting. Our algorithm, Optimistic Pessimistically Initialised Q-Learning (OPIQ), augments the Q-value estimates of a DQN-based agent with count-derived bonuses to ensure optimism during both action selection and bootstrapping. We show that OPIQ outperforms non-optimistic DQN variants that utilise a pseudocount-based intrinsic motivation in hard exploration tasks, and that it predicts optimistic estimates for novel state-action pairs.