Progress in continual reinforcement learning has been limited due to several barriers to entry: missing code, high compute requirements, and a lack of suitable benchmarks. In this work, we present CORA, a platform for Continual Reinforcement Learning Agents that provides benchmarks, baselines, and metrics in a single code package. The benchmarks we provide are designed to evaluate different aspects of the continual RL challenge, such as catastrophic forgetting, plasticity, ability to generalize, and sample-efficient learning. Three of the benchmarks utilize video game environments (Atari, Procgen, NetHack). The fourth benchmark, CHORES, consists of four different task sequences in a visually realistic home simulator, drawn from a diverse set of task and scene parameters. To compare continual RL methods on these benchmarks, we prepare three metrics in CORA: Continual Evaluation, Isolated Forgetting, and Zero-Shot Forward Transfer. Finally, CORA includes a set of performant, open-source baselines of existing algorithms for researchers to use and expand on. We release CORA and hope that the continual RL community can benefit from our contributions, to accelerate the development of new continual RL algorithms.

The ability for an agent to continuously learn new skills without catastrophically forgetting existing knowledge is of critical importance for the development of generally intelligent agents. Most methods devised to address this problem depend heavily on well-defined task boundaries, and thus depend on human supervision. Our task-agnostic method, Self-Activating Neural Ensembles (SANE), uses a modular architecture designed to avoid catastrophic forgetting without making any such assumptions. At the beginning of each trajectory, a module in the SANE ensemble is activated to determine the agent's next policy. During training, new modules are created as needed and only activated modules are updated to ensure that unused modules remain unchanged. This system enables our method to retain and leverage old skills, while growing and learning new ones. We demonstrate our approach on visually rich procedurally generated environments.

Lifelong learning aims to create AI systems that continuously and incrementally learn during a lifetime, similar to biological learning. Attempts so far have met problems, including catastrophic forgetting, interference among tasks, and the inability to exploit previous knowledge. While considerable research has focused on learning multiple input distributions, typically in classification, lifelong reinforcement learning (LRL) must also deal with variations in the state and transition distributions, and in the reward functions. Modulating masks, recently developed for classification, are particularly suitable to deal with such a large spectrum of task variations. In this paper, we adapted modulating masks to work with deep LRL, specifically PPO and IMPALA agents. The comparison with LRL baselines in both discrete and continuous RL tasks shows competitive performance. We further investigated the use of a linear combination of previously learned masks to exploit previous knowledge when learning new tasks: not only is learning faster, the algorithm solves tasks that we could not otherwise solve from scratch due to extremely sparse rewards. The results suggest that RL with modulating masks is a promising approach to lifelong learning, to the composition of knowledge to learn increasingly complex tasks, and to knowledge reuse for efficient and faster learning.

深度加强学习概括（RL）的研究旨在产生RL算法，其政策概括为在部署时间进行新的未经调整情况，避免对其培训环境的过度接受。如果我们要在现实世界的情景中部署强化学习算法，那么解决这一点至关重要，那么环境将多样化，动态和不可预测。该调查是这个新生领域的概述。我们为讨论不同的概括问题提供统一的形式主义和术语，在以前的作品上建立不同的概括问题。我们继续对现有的基准进行分类，以及用于解决泛化问题的当前方法。最后，我们提供了对现场当前状态的关键讨论，包括未来工作的建议。在其他结论之外，我们认为，采取纯粹的程序内容生成方法，基准设计不利于泛化的进展，我们建议快速在线适应和将RL特定问题解决作为未来泛化方法的一些领域，我们推荐在UniTexplorated问题设置中构建基准测试，例如离线RL泛化和奖励函数变化。

我们开发了一种新的持续元学习方法，以解决连续多任务学习中的挑战。在此设置中，代理商的目标是快速通过任何任务序列实现高奖励。先前的Meta-Creenifiltive学习算法已经表现出有希望加速收购新任务的结果。但是，他们需要在培训期间访问所有任务。除了简单地将过去的经验转移到新任务，我们的目标是设计学习学习的持续加强学习算法，使用他们以前任务的经验更快地学习新任务。我们介绍了一种新的方法，连续的元策略搜索（Comps），通过以增量方式，在序列中的每个任务上，通过序列的每个任务来消除此限制，而无需重新访问先前的任务。 Comps持续重复两个子程序：使用RL学习新任务，并使用RL的经验完全离线Meta学习，为后续任务学习做好准备。我们发现，在若干挑战性连续控制任务的旧序列上，Comps优于持续的持续学习和非政策元增强方法。

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。

智能代理人应该有能力利用先前学习的任务中的知识，以便快速有效地学习新任务。元学习方法已成为实现这一目标的流行解决方案。然而，迄今为止，元强化学习（META-RL）算法仅限于具有狭窄任务分布的简单环境。此外，预处理的范式随后进行了微调以适应新任务，这是一种简单而有效的解决方案，这些解决方案是监督和自我监督的学习。这使质疑元学习方法的好处在加强学习中的好处，这通常是以高复杂性为代价的。因此，我们研究了包括Procgen，rlbench和Atari在内的各种基于视觉的基准测试中的元RL方法，在这些基准测试中，对完全新颖的任务进行了评估。我们的发现表明，当对不同任务（而不是相同任务的不同变化）评估元学习方法时，对新任务进行微调的多任务预处理也相同或更好，或者更好，比用meta进行元数据。测试时间适应。这对于将来的研究令人鼓舞，因为多任务预处理往往比Meta-RL更简单和计算更便宜。从这些发现中，我们主张评估未来的Meta-RL方法在更具挑战性的任务上，并包括以简单但强大的基线进行微调预处理。

We study the use of model-based reinforcement learning methods, in particular, world models for continual reinforcement learning. In continual reinforcement learning, an agent is required to solve one task and then another sequentially while retaining performance and preventing forgetting on past tasks. World models offer a task-agnostic solution: they do not require knowledge of task changes. World models are a straight-forward baseline for continual reinforcement learning for three main reasons. Firstly, forgetting in the world model is prevented by persisting existing experience replay buffers across tasks, experience from previous tasks is replayed for learning the world model. Secondly, they are sample efficient. Thirdly and finally, they offer a task-agnostic exploration strategy through the uncertainty in the trajectories generated by the world model. We show that world models are a simple and effective continual reinforcement learning baseline. We study their effectiveness on Minigrid and Minihack continual reinforcement learning benchmarks and show that it outperforms state of the art task-agnostic continual reinforcement learning methods.

We present a retrospective on the state of Embodied AI research. Our analysis focuses on 13 challenges presented at the Embodied AI Workshop at CVPR. These challenges are grouped into three themes: (1) visual navigation, (2) rearrangement, and (3) embodied vision-and-language. We discuss the dominant datasets within each theme, evaluation metrics for the challenges, and the performance of state-of-the-art models. We highlight commonalities between top approaches to the challenges and identify potential future directions for Embodied AI research.

We introduce Procgen Benchmark, a suite of 16 procedurally generated game-like environments designed to benchmark both sample efficiency and generalization in reinforcement learning. We believe that the community will benefit from increased access to high quality training environments, and we provide detailed experimental protocols for using this benchmark. We empirically demonstrate that diverse environment distributions are essential to adequately train and evaluate RL agents, thereby motivating the extensive use of procedural content generation. We then use this benchmark to investigate the effects of scaling model size, finding that larger models significantly improve both sample efficiency and generalization.

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.

人类通常通过将它们分解为更容易的子问题，然后结合子问题解决方案来解决复杂的问题。这种类型的组成推理允许在解决共享一部分基础构图结构的未来任务时重复使用子问题解决方案。在持续或终身的强化学习（RL）设置中，将知识分解为可重复使用的组件的能力将使代理通过利用积累的组成结构来快速学习新的RL任务。我们基于神经模块探索一种特定形式的组成形式，并提出了一组RL问题，可以直观地接受组成溶液。从经验上讲，我们证明了神经组成确实捕获了问题空间的基本结构。我们进一步提出了一种构图终身RL方法，该方法利用累积的神经成分来加速学习未来任务的学习，同时通过离线RL通过离线RL保留以前的RL，而不是重播经验。

深度神经网络的强大学习能力使强化学习者能够直接从连续环境中学习有效的控制政策。从理论上讲，为了实现稳定的性能，神经网络假设I.I.D.不幸的是，在训练数据在时间上相关且非平稳的一般强化学习范式中，输入不存在。这个问题可能导致“灾难性干扰”和性能崩溃的现象。在本文中，我们提出智商，即干涉意识深度Q学习，以减轻单任务深度加固学习中的灾难性干扰。具体来说，我们求助于在线聚类，以实现在线上下文部门，以及一个多头网络和一个知识蒸馏正规化术语，用于保留学习上下文的政策。与现有方法相比，智商基于深Q网络，始终如一地提高稳定性和性能，并通过对经典控制和ATARI任务进行了广泛的实验。该代码可在以下网址公开获取：https：//github.com/sweety-dm/interference-aware-ware-deep-q-learning。

深度强化学习（RL）的进展是通过用于培训代理商的具有挑战性的基准的可用性来驱动。但是，社区广泛采用的基准未明确设计用于评估RL方法的特定功能。虽然存在用于评估RL的特定打开问题的环境（例如探索，转移学习，无监督环境设计，甚至语言辅助RL），但一旦研究超出证明，通常难以将这些更富有，更复杂的环境 - 概念结果。我们展示了一个强大的沙箱框架，用于易于设计新颖的RL环境。 Minihack是一个停止商店，用于RL实验，环境包括从小房间到复杂的，程序生成的世界。通过利用来自Nethack的全套实体和环境动态，MiniHack是最富有的基网上的视频游戏之一，允许设计快速方便的定制RL测试台。使用这种沙箱框架，可以轻松设计新颖的环境，可以使用人类可读的描述语言或简单的Python接口来设计。除了各种RL任务和基线外，Minihack还可以包装现有的RL基准，并提供无缝添加额外复杂性的方法。

Inspired by progress in large-scale language modeling, we apply a similar approach towards building a single generalist agent beyond the realm of text outputs. The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens. In this report we describe the model and the data, and document the current capabilities of Gato.

离线强化学习在利用大型预采用的数据集进行政策学习方面表现出了巨大的希望，使代理商可以放弃经常廉价的在线数据收集。但是，迄今为止，离线强化学习的探索相对较小，并且缺乏对剩余挑战所在的何处的了解。在本文中，我们试图建立简单的基线以在视觉域中连续控制。我们表明，对两个基于最先进的在线增强学习算法，Dreamerv2和DRQ-V2进行了简单的修改，足以超越事先工作并建立竞争性的基准。我们在现有的离线数据集中对这些算法进行了严格的评估，以及从视觉观察结果中进行离线强化学习的新测试台，更好地代表现实世界中离线增强学习问题中存在的数据分布，并开放我们的代码和数据以促进此方面的进度重要领域。最后，我们介绍并分析了来自视觉观察的离线RL所独有的几个关键Desiderata，包括视觉分散注意力和动态视觉上可识别的变化。

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

Lack of performance when it comes to continual learning over non-stationary distributions of data remains a major challenge in scaling neural network learning to more human realistic settings. In this work we propose a new conceptualization of the continual learning problem in terms of a temporally symmetric trade-off between transfer and interference that can be optimized by enforcing gradient alignment across examples. We then propose a new algorithm, Meta-Experience Replay (MER), that directly exploits this view by combining experience replay with optimization based meta-learning. This method learns parameters that make interference based on future gradients less likely and transfer based on future gradients more likely. 1 We conduct experiments across continual lifelong supervised learning benchmarks and non-stationary reinforcement learning environments demonstrating that our approach consistently outperforms recently proposed baselines for continual learning. Our experiments show that the gap between the performance of MER and baseline algorithms grows both as the environment gets more non-stationary and as the fraction of the total experiences stored gets smaller.

Deep reinforcement learning is poised to revolutionise the field of AI and represents a step towards building autonomous systems with a higher level understanding of the visual world. Currently, deep learning is enabling reinforcement learning to scale to problems that were previously intractable, such as learning to play video games directly from pixels. Deep reinforcement learning algorithms are also applied to robotics, allowing control policies for robots to be learned directly from camera inputs in the real world. In this survey, we begin with an introduction to the general field of reinforcement learning, then progress to the main streams of value-based and policybased methods. Our survey will cover central algorithms in deep reinforcement learning, including the deep Q-network, trust region policy optimisation, and asynchronous advantage actor-critic. In parallel, we highlight the unique advantages of deep neural networks, focusing on visual understanding via reinforcement learning. To conclude, we describe several current areas of research within the field.

应对深层终身强化学习（LRL）挑战的一种方法是仔细管理代理商的学习经验，以学习（不忘记）并建立内部元模型（任务，环境，代理商和世界）。生成重播（GR）是一种以生物学启发的重播机制，可以通过从内部生成模型中绘制的自标记示例来增强学习经验，该模型随着时间的推移而更新。在本文中，我们提出了一个满足两个Desiderata的GR版本：（a）使用深RL学习的策略的潜在策略的内省密度建模，以及（b）无模型的端到端学习。在这项工作中，我们研究了三个无模型GR的深度学习体系结构。我们在三种不同的情况下评估了我们提出的算法，其中包括来自Starcraft2和Minigrid域的任务。我们报告了几个关键发现，显示了设计选择对定量指标的影响，包括转移学习，对看不见的任务的概括，任务更改后的快速适应，与任务专家相当的绩效以及最小化灾难性遗忘。我们观察到我们的GR可以防止从深层批评剂的潜在矢量空间中的特征映射中漂移。我们还显示了既定的终身学习指标的改进。我们发现，当与重播缓冲液和生成的重播缓冲液结合使用时，需要引入一个小的随机重放缓冲液，以显着提高训练的稳定性。总体而言，我们发现“隐藏的重播”（一种众所周知的班级入学分类体系结构）是最有前途的方法，它推动了LRL的GR中最新的方法。