在线强化学习(RL)算法通常难以在复杂的人体面对应用中部署,因为它们可能会缓慢学习并且早期性能差。为了解决这个问题,我们介绍了一种结合人类洞察速度学习的实用算法。我们的算法,约束采样增强学习(CSRL)将现有域知识包含为RL策略的约束/限制。它需要多种潜在的政策限制,以保持稳健性,以便在利用有用的时击败个体限制,以便快速学习。鉴于基础RL学习算法(例如UCRL,DQN,Rainbow),我们提出了对消除方案的上下置信度,该方案利用了限制与其观察性能之间的关系,以便自适应地切换它们。我们将我们的算法用DQN型算法和UCRL作为基础算法,并在四种环境中评估我们的算法,包括基于实际数据的三个模拟器:建议,教育活动排序和HIV处理测序。在所有情况下,CSRL比基线更快地学习良好的政策。
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由于数据量增加,金融业的快速变化已经彻底改变了数据处理和数据分析的技术,并带来了新的理论和计算挑战。与古典随机控制理论和解决财务决策问题的其他分析方法相比,解决模型假设的财务决策问题,强化学习(RL)的新发展能够充分利用具有更少模型假设的大量财务数据并改善复杂的金融环境中的决策。该调查纸目的旨在审查最近的资金途径的发展和使用RL方法。我们介绍了马尔可夫决策过程,这是许多常用的RL方法的设置。然后引入各种算法,重点介绍不需要任何模型假设的基于价值和基于策略的方法。连接是用神经网络进行的,以扩展框架以包含深的RL算法。我们的调查通过讨论了这些RL算法在金融中各种决策问题中的应用,包括最佳执行,投资组合优化,期权定价和对冲,市场制作,智能订单路由和Robo-Awaring。
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在过去的十年中,多智能经纪人强化学习(Marl)已经有了重大进展,但仍存在许多挑战,例如高样本复杂性和慢趋同稳定的政策,在广泛的部署之前需要克服,这是可能的。然而,在实践中,许多现实世界的环境已经部署了用于生成策略的次优或启发式方法。一个有趣的问题是如何最好地使用这些方法作为顾问,以帮助改善多代理领域的加强学习。在本文中,我们提供了一个原则的框架,用于将动作建议纳入多代理设置中的在线次优顾问。我们描述了在非传记通用随机游戏环境中提供多种智能强化代理(海军上将)的问题,并提出了两种新的基于Q学习的算法:海军上将决策(海军DM)和海军上将 - 顾问评估(Admiral-AE) ,这使我们能够通过适当地纳入顾问(Admiral-DM)的建议来改善学习,并评估顾问(Admiral-AE)的有效性。我们从理论上分析了算法,并在一般加上随机游戏中提供了关于他们学习的定点保证。此外,广泛的实验说明了这些算法:可以在各种环境中使用,具有对其他相关基线的有利相比的性能,可以扩展到大状态行动空间,并且对来自顾问的不良建议具有稳健性。
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A long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence is lifelong learning. In lifelong learning, many tasks are presented in sequence and learners must efficiently transfer knowledge between tasks while avoiding catastrophic forgetting over long lifetimes. On these problems, policy reuse and other multi-policy reinforcement learning techniques can learn many tasks. However, they can generate many temporary or permanent policies, resulting in memory issues. Consequently, there is a need for lifetime-scalable methods that continually refine a policy library of a pre-defined size. This paper presents a first approach to lifetime-scalable policy reuse. To pre-select the number of policies, a notion of task capacity, the maximal number of tasks that a policy can accurately solve, is proposed. To evaluate lifetime policy reuse using this method, two state-of-the-art single-actor base-learners are compared: 1) a value-based reinforcement learner, Deep Q-Network (DQN) or Deep Recurrent Q-Network (DRQN); and 2) an actor-critic reinforcement learner, Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) with or without Long Short-Term Memory layer. By selecting the number of policies based on task capacity, D(R)QN achieves near-optimal performance with 6 policies in a 27-task MDP domain and 9 policies in an 18-task POMDP domain; with fewer policies, catastrophic forgetting and negative transfer are observed. Due to slow, monotonic improvement, PPO requires fewer policies, 1 policy for the 27-task domain and 4 policies for the 18-task domain, but it learns the tasks with lower accuracy than D(R)QN. These findings validate lifetime-scalable policy reuse and suggest using D(R)QN for larger and PPO for smaller library sizes.
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在线强化学习(RL)中的挑战之一是代理人需要促进对环境的探索和对样品的利用来优化其行为。无论我们是否优化遗憾,采样复杂性,状态空间覆盖范围或模型估计,我们都需要攻击不同的勘探开发权衡。在本文中,我们建议在分离方法组成的探索 - 剥削问题:1)“客观特定”算法(自适应)规定哪些样本以收集到哪些状态,似乎它可以访问a生成模型(即环境的模拟器); 2)负责尽可能快地生成规定样品的“客观无关的”样品收集勘探策略。建立最近在随机最短路径问题中进行探索的方法,我们首先提供一种算法,它给出了每个状态动作对所需的样本$ B(S,a)$的样本数量,需要$ \ tilde {o} (bd + d ^ {3/2} s ^ 2 a)收集$ b = \ sum_ {s,a} b(s,a)$所需样本的$时间步骤,以$ s $各国,$ a $行动和直径$ d $。然后我们展示了这种通用探索算法如何与“客观特定的”策略配对,这些策略规定了解决各种设置的样本要求 - 例如,模型估计,稀疏奖励发现,无需无成本勘探沟通MDP - 我们获得改进或新颖的样本复杂性保证。
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离线政策优化可能会对许多现实世界的决策问题产生重大影响,因为在线学习在许多应用中可能是不可行的。重要性采样及其变体是离线策略评估中一种常用的估计器类型,此类估计器通常不需要关于价值函数或决策过程模型功能类的属性和代表性能力的假设。在本文中,我们确定了一种重要的过度拟合现象,以优化重要性加权收益,在这种情况下,学到的政策可以基本上避免在最初的状态空间的一部分中做出一致的决策。我们提出了一种算法,以避免通过新的每个国家 - 邻居标准化约束过度拟合,并提供对拟议算法的理论理由。我们还显示了以前尝试这种方法的局限性。我们在以医疗风格的模拟器为中测试算法,该模拟器是从真实医院收集的记录数据集和连续的控制任务。这些实验表明,与最先进的批处理学习算法相比,所提出的方法的过度拟合和更好的测试性能。
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Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without further interaction. However, in practice, offline RL presents a major challenge, and standard off-policy RL methods can fail due to overestimation of values induced by the distributional shift between the dataset and the learned policy, especially when training on complex and multi-modal data distributions. In this paper, we propose conservative Q-learning (CQL), which aims to address these limitations by learning a conservative Q-function such that the expected value of a policy under this Q-function lower-bounds its true value. We theoretically show that CQL produces a lower bound on the value of the current policy and that it can be incorporated into a policy learning procedure with theoretical improvement guarantees. In practice, CQL augments the standard Bellman error objective with a simple Q-value regularizer which is straightforward to implement on top of existing deep Q-learning and actor-critic implementations. On both discrete and continuous control domains, we show that CQL substantially outperforms existing offline RL methods, often learning policies that attain 2-5 times higher final return, especially when learning from complex and multi-modal data distributions.Preprint. Under review.
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In this work we introduce reinforcement learning techniques for solving lexicographic multi-objective problems. These are problems that involve multiple reward signals, and where the goal is to learn a policy that maximises the first reward signal, and subject to this constraint also maximises the second reward signal, and so on. We present a family of both action-value and policy gradient algorithms that can be used to solve such problems, and prove that they converge to policies that are lexicographically optimal. We evaluate the scalability and performance of these algorithms empirically, demonstrating their practical applicability. As a more specific application, we show how our algorithms can be used to impose safety constraints on the behaviour of an agent, and compare their performance in this context with that of other constrained reinforcement learning algorithms.
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Many real-world reinforcement learning tasks require control of complex dynamical systems that involve both costly data acquisition processes and large state spaces. In cases where the transition dynamics can be readily evaluated at specified states (e.g., via a simulator), agents can operate in what is often referred to as planning with a \emph{generative model}. We propose the AE-LSVI algorithm for best-policy identification, a novel variant of the kernelized least-squares value iteration (LSVI) algorithm that combines optimism with pessimism for active exploration (AE). AE-LSVI provably identifies a near-optimal policy \emph{uniformly} over an entire state space and achieves polynomial sample complexity guarantees that are independent of the number of states. When specialized to the recently introduced offline contextual Bayesian optimization setting, our algorithm achieves improved sample complexity bounds. Experimentally, we demonstrate that AE-LSVI outperforms other RL algorithms in a variety of environments when robustness to the initial state is required.
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Adequately assigning credit to actions for future outcomes based on their contributions is a long-standing open challenge in Reinforcement Learning. The assumptions of the most commonly used credit assignment method are disadvantageous in tasks where the effects of decisions are not immediately evident. Furthermore, this method can only evaluate actions that have been selected by the agent, making it highly inefficient. Still, no alternative methods have been widely adopted in the field. Hindsight Credit Assignment is a promising, but still unexplored candidate, which aims to solve the problems of both long-term and counterfactual credit assignment. In this thesis, we empirically investigate Hindsight Credit Assignment to identify its main benefits, and key points to improve. Then, we apply it to factored state representations, and in particular to state representations based on the causal structure of the environment. In this setting, we propose a variant of Hindsight Credit Assignment that effectively exploits a given causal structure. We show that our modification greatly decreases the workload of Hindsight Credit Assignment, making it more efficient and enabling it to outperform the baseline credit assignment method on various tasks. This opens the way to other methods based on given or learned causal structures.
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Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) extend multi-armed bandits to allow for stateful arms, where the state of each arm evolves restlessly with different transitions depending on whether that arm is pulled. Solving RMABs requires information on transition dynamics, which are often unknown upfront. To plan in RMAB settings with unknown transitions, we propose the first online learning algorithm based on the Whittle index policy, using an upper confidence bound (UCB) approach to learn transition dynamics. Specifically, we estimate confidence bounds of the transition probabilities and formulate a bilinear program to compute optimistic Whittle indices using these estimates. Our algorithm, UCWhittle, achieves sublinear $O(H \sqrt{T \log T})$ frequentist regret to solve RMABs with unknown transitions in $T$ episodes with a constant horizon $H$. Empirically, we demonstrate that UCWhittle leverages the structure of RMABs and the Whittle index policy solution to achieve better performance than existing online learning baselines across three domains, including one constructed via sampling from a real-world maternal and childcare dataset.
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在强化学习中,蒙特卡洛算法通过平均偶发回报来更新Q功能。在Monte Carlo UCB(MC-UCB)算法中,在每个状态下采取的动作是最大化Q函数加上UCB勘探项的动作,该术语偏向于选择频率较低的动作的选择。尽管在为MC-UCB建立遗憾界限方面已经进行了重要的工作,但大多数工作都集中在该问题的有限培训版本上,每个情节都在不断数量的步骤后终止。对于此类有限的Horizo​​n问题,最佳策略既取决于当前状态和情节中的时间。但是,对于许多自然的情节问题,例如GO,CHESS和机器人任务等游戏,该情节是随机的,最佳政策是静止的。对于此类环境,MC-UCB中的Q功能是否会收敛到最佳Q函数,这是一个空旷的问题。我们猜想,与Q学习不同,它并不是所有MDP的收敛。尽管如此,我们表明,对于大型MDP,其中包括二十一点和确定性MDP等随机MDP,例如GO,MC-UCB中的Q功能几乎可以肯定地收敛到最佳Q函数。该结果的直接推论是,它几乎肯定会为所有有限的Horizo​​n MDP收敛。我们还提供了数值实验,为MC-UCB提供了进一步的见解。
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深度强化学习(RL)导致了许多最近和开创性的进步。但是,这些进步通常以培训的基础体系结构的规模增加以及用于训练它们的RL算法的复杂性提高,而均以增加规模的成本。这些增长反过来又使研究人员更难迅速原型新想法或复制已发表的RL算法。为了解决这些问题,这项工作描述了ACME,这是一个用于构建新型RL算法的框架,这些框架是专门设计的,用于启用使用简单的模块化组件构建的代理,这些组件可以在各种执行范围内使用。尽管ACME的主要目标是为算法开发提供一个框架,但第二个目标是提供重要或最先进算法的简单参考实现。这些实现既是对我们的设计决策的验证,也是对RL研究中可重复性的重要贡献。在这项工作中,我们描述了ACME内部做出的主要设计决策,并提供了有关如何使用其组件来实施各种算法的进一步详细信息。我们的实验为许多常见和最先进的算法提供了基准,并显示了如何为更大且更复杂的环境扩展这些算法。这突出了ACME的主要优点之一,即它可用于实现大型,分布式的RL算法,这些算法可以以较大的尺度运行,同时仍保持该实现的固有可读性。这项工作提出了第二篇文章的版本,恰好与模块化的增加相吻合,对离线,模仿和从演示算法学习以及作为ACME的一部分实现的各种新代理。
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我们介绍了一种改进政策改进的方法,该方法在基于价值的强化学习(RL)的贪婪方法与基于模型的RL的典型计划方法之间进行了插值。新方法建立在几何视野模型(GHM,也称为伽马模型)的概念上,该模型对给定策略的折现状态验证分布进行了建模。我们表明,我们可以通过仔细的基本策略GHM的仔细组成,而无需任何其他学习,可以评估任何非马尔科夫策略,以固定的概率在一组基本马尔可夫策略之间切换。然后,我们可以将广义政策改进(GPI)应用于此类非马尔科夫政策的收集,以获得新的马尔可夫政策,通常将其表现优于其先驱。我们对这种方法提供了彻底的理论分析,开发了转移和标准RL的应用,并在经验上证明了其对标准GPI的有效性,对充满挑战的深度RL连续控制任务。我们还提供了GHM培训方法的分析,证明了关于先前提出的方法的新型收敛结果,并显示了如何在深度RL设置中稳定训练这些模型。
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Atari games have been a long-standing benchmark in the reinforcement learning (RL) community for the past decade. This benchmark was proposed to test general competency of RL algorithms. Previous work has achieved good average performance by doing outstandingly well on many games of the set, but very poorly in several of the most challenging games. We propose Agent57, the first deep RL agent that outperforms the standard human benchmark on all 57 Atari games. To achieve this result, we train a neural network which parameterizes a family of policies ranging from very exploratory to purely exploitative. We propose an adaptive mechanism to choose which policy to prioritize throughout the training process. Additionally, we utilize a novel parameterization of the architecture that allows for more consistent and stable learning.
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我们介绍了一种普遍的策略,可实现有效的多目标勘探。它依赖于adagoal,一种基于简单约束优化问题的新的目标选择方案,其自适应地针对目标状态,这既不是太困难也不是根据代理目前的知识达到的。我们展示了Adagoal如何用于解决学习$ \ epsilon $ -optimal的目标条件的政策,以便在$ L $ S_0 $ S_0 $奖励中获得的每一个目标状态,以便在$ S_0 $中获取。免费马尔可夫决策过程。在标准的表格外壳中,我们的算法需要$ \ tilde {o}(l ^ 3 s a \ epsilon ^ { - 2})$探索步骤,这几乎很少最佳。我们还容易在线性混合Markov决策过程中实例化Adagoal,其产生具有线性函数近似的第一目标导向的PAC保证。除了强大的理论保证之外,迈克纳队以现有方法的高级别算法结构为锚定,为目标条件的深度加固学习。
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一种简单自然的增强学习算法(RL)是蒙特卡洛探索开始(MCES),通过平均蒙特卡洛回报来估算Q功能,并通过选择最大化Q当前估计的行动来改进策略。 -功能。探索是通过“探索开始”来执行的,即每个情节以随机选择的状态和动作开始,然后遵循当前的策略到终端状态。在Sutton&Barto(2018)的RL经典书中,据说建立MCES算法的收敛是RL中最重要的剩余理论问题之一。但是,MCE的收敛问题证明是非常细微的。 Bertsekas&Tsitsiklis(1996)提供了一个反例,表明MCES算法不一定会收敛。 TSITSIKLIS(2002)进一步表明,如果修改了原始MCES算法,以使Q-功能估计值以所有状态行动对以相同的速率更新,并且折现因子严格少于一个,则MCES算法收敛。在本文中,我们通过Sutton&Barto(1998)中给出的原始,更有效的MCES算法取得进展政策。这样的MDP包括大量的环境,例如所有确定性环境和所有具有时间步长的情节环境或作为状态的任何单调变化的值。与以前使用随机近似的证据不同,我们引入了一种新型的感应方法,该方法非常简单,仅利用大量的强规律。
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Safe Reinforcement Learning can be defined as the process of learning policies that maximize the expectation of the return in problems in which it is important to ensure reasonable system performance and/or respect safety constraints during the learning and/or deployment processes. We categorize and analyze two approaches of Safe Reinforcement Learning. The first is based on the modification of the optimality criterion, the classic discounted finite/infinite horizon, with a safety factor. The second is based on the modification of the exploration process through the incorporation of external knowledge or the guidance of a risk metric. We use the proposed classification to survey the existing literature, as well as suggesting future directions for Safe Reinforcement Learning.
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The reinforcement learning paradigm is a popular way to address problems that have only limited environmental feedback, rather than correctly labeled examples, as is common in other machine learning contexts. While significant progress has been made to improve learning in a single task, the idea of transfer learning has only recently been applied to reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of transfer is that experience gained in learning to perform one task can help improve learning performance in a related, but different, task. In this article we present a framework that classifies transfer learning methods in terms of their capabilities and goals, and then use it to survey the existing literature, as well as to suggest future directions for transfer learning work.
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除了最大化奖励目标之外,现实世界中的强化学习(RL)代理商必须满足安全限制。基于模型的RL算法占据了减少不安全的现实世界行动的承诺:它们可以合成使用来自学习模型的模拟样本遵守所有约束的策略。但是,即使对于预测满足所有约束的操作,甚至可能导致真实的结构违规。我们提出了保守和自适应惩罚(CAP),一种基于模型的安全RL框架,其通过捕获模型不确定性并自适应利用它来平衡奖励和成本目标来占潜在的建模错误。首先,CAP利用基于不确定性的惩罚来膨胀预测成本。从理论上讲,我们展示了满足这种保守成本约束的政策,也可以保证在真正的环境中是可行的。我们进一步表明,这保证了在RL培训期间所有中间解决方案的安全性。此外,在使用环境中使用真正的成本反馈,帽子在培训期间自适应地调整这种惩罚。我们在基于状态和基于图像的环境中,评估了基于模型的安全RL的保守和自适应惩罚方法。我们的结果表明了样品效率的大量收益,同时产生比现有安全RL算法更少的违规行为。代码可用:https://github.com/redrew/cap
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