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.

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。

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.

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.

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.

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。

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.

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。

Continual Learning (CL) is a field dedicated to devise algorithms able to achieve lifelong learning. Overcoming the knowledge disruption of previously acquired concepts, a drawback affecting deep learning models and that goes by the name of catastrophic forgetting, is a hard challenge. Currently, deep learning methods can attain impressive results when the data modeled does not undergo a considerable distributional shift in subsequent learning sessions, but whenever we expose such systems to this incremental setting, performance drop very quickly. Overcoming this limitation is fundamental as it would allow us to build truly intelligent systems showing stability and plasticity. Secondly, it would allow us to overcome the onerous limitation of retraining these architectures from scratch with the new updated data. In this thesis, we tackle the problem from multiple directions. In a first study, we show that in rehearsal-based techniques (systems that use memory buffer), the quantity of data stored in the rehearsal buffer is a more important factor over the quality of the data. Secondly, we propose one of the early works of incremental learning on ViTs architectures, comparing functional, weight and attention regularization approaches and propose effective novel a novel asymmetric loss. At the end we conclude with a study on pretraining and how it affects the performance in Continual Learning, raising some questions about the effective progression of the field. We then conclude with some future directions and closing remarks.

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.

人类的持续学习（CL）能力与稳定性与可塑性困境密切相关，描述了人类如何实现持续的学习能力和保存的学习信息。自发育以来，CL的概念始终存在于人工智能（AI）中。本文提出了对CL的全面审查。与之前的评论不同，主要关注CL中的灾难性遗忘现象，本文根据稳定性与可塑性机制的宏观视角来调查CL。类似于生物对应物，“智能”AI代理商应该是I）记住以前学到的信息（信息回流）; ii）不断推断新信息（信息浏览:); iii）转移有用的信息（信息转移），以实现高级CL。根据分类学，评估度量，算法，应用以及一些打开问题。我们的主要贡献涉及I）从人工综合情报层面重新检查CL; ii）在CL主题提供详细和广泛的概述; iii）提出一些关于CL潜在发展的新颖思路。

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.

Interacting with a complex world involves continual learning, in which tasks and data distributions change over time. A continual learning system should demonstrate both plasticity (acquisition of new knowledge) and stability (preservation of old knowledge). Catastrophic forgetting is the failure of stability, in which new experience overwrites previous experience. In the brain, replay of past experience is widely believed to reduce forgetting, yet it has been largely overlooked as a solution to forgetting in deep reinforcement learning. Here, we introduce CLEAR, a replay-based method that greatly reduces catastrophic forgetting in multi-task reinforcement learning. CLEAR leverages off-policy learning and behavioral cloning from replay to enhance stability, as well as on-policy learning to preserve plasticity. We show that CLEAR performs better than state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for mitigating forgetting, despite being significantly less complicated and not requiring any knowledge of the individual tasks being learned.

Humans and animals have the ability to continually acquire, fine-tune, and transfer knowledge and skills throughout their lifespan. This ability, referred to as lifelong learning, is mediated by a rich set of neurocognitive mechanisms that together contribute to the development and specialization of our sensorimotor skills as well as to long-term memory consolidation and retrieval. Consequently, lifelong learning capabilities are crucial for computational systems and autonomous agents interacting in the real world and processing continuous streams of information. However, lifelong learning remains a long-standing challenge for machine learning and neural network models since the continual acquisition of incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions generally leads to catastrophic forgetting or interference. This limitation represents a major drawback for state-of-the-art deep neural network models that typically learn representations from stationary batches of training data, thus without accounting for situations in which information becomes incrementally available over time. In this review, we critically summarize the main challenges linked to lifelong learning for artificial learning systems and compare existing neural network approaches that alleviate, to different extents, catastrophic forgetting. Although significant advances have been made in domain-specific learning with neural networks, extensive research efforts are required for the development of robust lifelong learning on autonomous agents and robots. We discuss well-established and emerging research motivated by lifelong learning factors in biological systems such as structural plasticity, memory replay, curriculum and transfer learning, intrinsic motivation, and multisensory integration.

在动态环境中，持续增强学习（CRL）的关键挑战是，随着环境在其生命周期的变化，同时最大程度地减少对学习的信息的灾难性忘记，随着环境在其一生中的变化而变化。为了应对这一挑战，在本文中，我们提出了Dacorl，即动态自动持续RL。 Dacorl使用渐进式上下文化学习了上下文条件条件的策略，该策略会逐步将动态环境中的一系列固定任务群集成一系列上下文，并选择一个可扩展的多头神经网络以近似策略。具体来说，我们定义了一组具有类似动力学的任务，并将上下文推理形式化为在线贝叶斯无限高斯混合物集群的过程，这些过程是在环境特征上，诉诸在线贝叶斯推断，以推断上下文的后端分布。在以前的中国餐厅流程的假设下，该技术可以将当前任务准确地分类为先前看到的上下文，或者根据需要实例化新的上下文，而无需依靠任何外部指标来提前向环境变化发出信号。此外，我们采用了可扩展的多头神经网络，其输出层与新实例化的上下文同步扩展，以及一个知识蒸馏正规化项来保留学习任务的性能。作为一个可以与各种深度RL算法结合使用的一般框架，Dacorl在稳定性，整体性能和概括能力方面具有一致的优势，而不是现有方法，这是通过对几种机器人导航和Mujoco Socomotion任务进行的广泛实验来验证的。

持续学习（CL，有时也称为增量学习）是机器学习的一种味道，在该口味中，通常会放松或省略固定数据分布的通常假设。当天然应用时，例如CL问题中的DNNS时，数据分布的变化会导致所谓的灾难性遗忘（CF）效应：突然丧失了先前的知识。尽管近年来已经为启用CL做出了许多重大贡献，但大多数作品都解决了受监督的（分类）问题。本文回顾了在其他环境中研究CL的文献，例如通过减少监督，完全无监督的学习和强化学习的学习。除了提出一个简单的模式用于分类CL方法W.R.T.他们的自主权和监督水平，我们讨论了与每种设置相关的具体挑战以及对CL领域的潜在贡献。

With the development of deep representation learning, the domain of reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful learning framework now capable of learning complex policies in high dimensional environments. This review summarises deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms and provides a taxonomy of automated driving tasks where (D)RL methods have been employed, while addressing key computational challenges in real world deployment of autonomous driving agents. It also delineates adjacent domains such as behavior cloning, imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning that are related but are not classical RL algorithms. The role of simulators in training agents, methods to validate, test and robustify existing solutions in RL are discussed.

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。

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.

Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity of knowledge, with endeavours to extend this knowledge without targeting the original task resulting in a catastrophic forgetting. Continual learning shifts this paradigm towards networks that can continually accumulate knowledge over different tasks without the need to retrain from scratch. We focus on task incremental classification, where tasks arrive sequentially and are delineated by clear boundaries. Our main contributions concern (1) a taxonomy and extensive overview of the state-of-the-art; (2) a novel framework to continually determine the stability-plasticity trade-off of the continual learner; (3) a comprehensive experimental comparison of 11 state-of-the-art continual learning methods and 4 baselines. We empirically scrutinize method strengths and weaknesses on three benchmarks, considering Tiny Imagenet and large-scale unbalanced iNaturalist and a sequence of recognition datasets. We study the influence of model capacity, weight decay and dropout regularization, and the order in which the tasks are presented, and qualitatively compare methods in terms of required memory, computation time and storage.