Value functions are a core component of reinforcement learning systems. The main idea is to to construct a single function approximator V (s; θ) that estimates the long-term reward from any state s, using parameters θ. In this paper we introduce universal value function approximators (UVFAs) V (s, g; θ) that generalise not just over states s but also over goals g. We develop an efficient technique for supervised learning of UVFAs, by factoring observed values into separate embedding vectors for state and goal, and then learning a mapping from s and g to these factored embedding vectors. We show how this technique may be incorporated into a reinforcement learning algorithm that updates the UVFA solely from observed rewards. Finally, we demonstrate that a UVFA can successfully generalise to previously unseen goals.

在本文中，我们提出了一种新的马尔可夫决策过程学习分层表示的方法。我们的方法通过将状态空间划分为子集，并定义用于在分区之间执行转换的子任务。我们制定将状态空间作为优化问题分区的问题，该优化问题可以使用梯度下降给出一组采样的轨迹来解决，使我们的方法适用于大状态空间的高维问题。我们经验验证方法，通过表示它可以成功地在导航域中成功学习有用的分层表示。一旦了解到，分层表示可以用于解决给定域中的不同任务，从而概括跨任务的知识。

尽管深度强化学习（RL）最近取得了许多成功，但其方法仍然效率低下，这使得在数据方面解决了昂贵的许多问题。我们的目标是通过利用未标记的数据中的丰富监督信号来进行学习状态表示，以解决这一问题。本文介绍了三种不同的表示算法，可以访问传统RL算法使用的数据源的不同子集使用：（i）GRICA受到独立组件分析（ICA）的启发，并训练深层神经网络以输出统计独立的独立特征。输入。 Grica通过最大程度地减少每个功能与其他功能之间的相互信息来做到这一点。此外，格里卡仅需要未分类的环境状态。 （ii）潜在表示预测（LARP）还需要更多的上下文：除了要求状态作为输入外，它还需要先前的状态和连接它们的动作。该方法通过预测当前状态和行动的环境的下一个状态来学习状态表示。预测器与图形搜索算法一起使用。 （iii）重新培训通过训练深层神经网络来学习国家表示，以学习奖励功能的平滑版本。该表示形式用于预处理输入到深度RL，而奖励预测指标用于奖励成型。此方法仅需要环境中的状态奖励对学习表示表示。我们发现，每种方法都有其优势和缺点，并从我们的实验中得出结论，包括无监督的代表性学习在RL解决问题的管道中可以加快学习的速度。

本文研究了一种使用背景计划的新方法，用于基于模型的增强学习：混合（近似）动态编程更新和无模型更新，类似于DYNA体系结构。通过学习模型的背景计划通常比无模型替代方案（例如Double DQN）差，尽管前者使用了更多的内存和计算。基本问题是，学到的模型可能是不准确的，并且经常会产生无效的状态，尤其是在迭代许多步骤时。在本文中，我们通过将背景规划限制为一组（抽象）子目标并仅学习本地，子观念模型来避免这种限制。这种目标空间计划（GSP）方法更有效地是在计算上，自然地纳入了时间抽象，以进行更快的长胜压计划，并避免完全学习过渡动态。我们表明，在各种情况下，我们的GSP算法比双DQN基线要快得多。

增强学习（RL）研究领域非常活跃，并具有重要的新贡献；特别是考虑到深RL（DRL）的新兴领域。但是，仍然需要解决许多科学和技术挑战，其中我们可以提及抽象行动的能力或在稀疏回报环境中探索环境的难以通过内在动机（IM）来解决的。我们建议通过基于信息理论的新分类法调查这些研究工作：我们在计算上重新审视了惊喜，新颖性和技能学习的概念。这使我们能够确定方法的优势和缺点，并展示当前的研究前景。我们的分析表明，新颖性和惊喜可以帮助建立可转移技能的层次结构，从而进一步抽象环境并使勘探过程更加健壮。

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.

We present the first deep learning model to successfully learn control policies directly from high-dimensional sensory input using reinforcement learning. The model is a convolutional neural network, trained with a variant of Q-learning, whose input is raw pixels and whose output is a value function estimating future rewards. We apply our method to seven Atari 2600 games from the Arcade Learning Environment, with no adjustment of the architecture or learning algorithm. We find that it outperforms all previous approaches on six of the games and surpasses a human expert on three of them.

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.

Learning goal-directed behavior in environments with sparse feedback is a major challenge for reinforcement learning algorithms. The primary difficulty arises due to insufficient exploration, resulting in an agent being unable to learn robust value functions. Intrinsically motivated agents can explore new behavior for its own sake rather than to directly solve problems. Such intrinsic behaviors could eventually help the agent solve tasks posed by the environment. We present hierarchical-DQN (h-DQN), a framework to integrate hierarchical value functions, operating at different temporal scales, with intrinsically motivated deep reinforcement learning. A top-level value function learns a policy over intrinsic goals, and a lower-level function learns a policy over atomic actions to satisfy the given goals. h-DQN allows for flexible goal specifications, such as functions over entities and relations. This provides an efficient space for exploration in complicated environments. We demonstrate the strength of our approach on two problems with very sparse, delayed feedback: (1) a complex discrete stochastic decision process, and (2) the classic ATARI game 'Montezuma's Revenge'.

当加强学习以稀疏的奖励应用时，代理必须花费很长时间探索未知环境而没有任何学习信号。抽象是一种为代理提供在潜在空间中过渡的内在奖励的方法。先前的工作着重于密集的连续潜在空间，或要求用户手动提供表示形式。我们的方法是第一个自动学习基础环境的离散抽象的方法。此外，我们的方法使用端到端可训练的正规后继代表模型在任意输入空间上起作用。对于抽象状态之间的过渡，我们以选项的形式训练一组时间扩展的动作，即动作抽象。我们提出的算法，离散的国家行动抽象（DSAA），在训练这些选项之间进行迭代交换，并使用它们有效地探索更多环境以改善状态抽象。结果，我们的模型不仅对转移学习，而且在在线学习环境中有用。我们从经验上表明，与基线加强学习算法相比，我们的代理能够探索环境并更有效地解决任务。我们的代码可在\ url {https://github.com/amnonattali/dsaa}上公开获得。

估计值函数是增强学习算法的核心组件。时间差异（TD）学习算法使用自引导，即，它们在随后的时间步骤中使用值估计更新朝向学习目标的值函数。或者，可以朝着通过单独预测继承人特征（SF）构成的学习目标来更新值函数 - 依赖于策略的模型 - 并将它们与瞬时奖励相结合。我们专注于在估计值函数时使用的自举目标，并提出新的备份目标，它是\ eta $ -return混合的混合，它隐含地结合了价值预测知识（由TD方法使用）与（继承人）特征预测知识 - 使用参数$ \ eta $捕获每个依赖的多少。我们说明通过$ \ eta \ gamma $ -dicounted sf模型结合了预测知识使得更有效地利用采样体验，而不是完全在价值函数估计上，或者在单独估计的继承功能的乘积上启动。和瞬时奖励模型。我们经验显示这种方法导致更快的政策评估和更好的控制性能，用于表格和非线性函数近似，指示可扩展性和一般性。

Maintaining accurate world knowledge in a complex and changing environment is a perennial problem for robots and other artificial intelligence systems. Our architecture for addressing this problem, called Horde, consists of a large number of independent reinforcement learning sub-agents, or demons. Each demon is responsible for answering a single predictive or goal-oriented question about the world, thereby contributing in a factored, modular way to the system's overall knowledge. The questions are in the form of a value function, but each demon has its own policy, reward function, termination function, and terminal-reward function unrelated to those of the base problem. Learning proceeds in parallel by all demons simultaneously so as to extract the maximal training information from whatever actions are taken by the system as a whole. Gradient-based temporal-difference learning methods are used to learn efficiently and reliably with function approximation in this off-policy setting. Horde runs in constant time and memory per time step, and is thus suitable for learning online in realtime applications such as robotics. We present results using Horde on a multi-sensored mobile robot to successfully learn goal-oriented behaviors and long-term predictions from offpolicy experience. Horde is a significant incremental step towards a real-time architecture for efficient learning of general knowledge from unsupervised sensorimotor interaction.

Hierarchical methods in reinforcement learning have the potential to reduce the amount of decisions that the agent needs to perform when learning new tasks. However, finding a reusable useful temporal abstractions that facilitate fast learning remains a challenging problem. Recently, several deep learning approaches were proposed to learn such temporal abstractions in the form of options in an end-to-end manner. In this work, we point out several shortcomings of these methods and discuss their potential negative consequences. Subsequently, we formulate the desiderata for reusable options and use these to frame the problem of learning options as a gradient-based meta-learning problem. This allows us to formulate an objective that explicitly incentivizes options which allow a higher-level decision maker to adjust in few steps to different tasks. Experimentally, we show that our method is able to learn transferable components which accelerate learning and performs better than existing prior methods developed for this setting. Additionally, we perform ablations to quantify the impact of using gradient-based meta-learning as well as other proposed changes.

我们确定和研究政策流失的现象，即基于价值的强化学习中贪婪政策的快速变化。政策流失以惊人的快速步伐运作，改变了少数学习更新（在Atari上的DQN等典型的深层RL设置中）中大量州的贪婪行动。我们从经验上表征了现象，验证它不限于特定算法或环境特性。许多消融有助于削弱关于为什么流失仅与深度学习有关的少数相关的合理解释。最后，我们假设政策流失是一种有益但被忽视的隐性探索形式，它以新鲜的方式铸造了$ \ epsilon $ greedy探索，即$ \ epsilon $ - noise的作用比预期的要小得多。

This paper surveys the eld of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the eld and a broad selection of current work are summarized. Reinforcement learning is the problem faced by an agent that learns behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a dynamic environment. The work described here has a resemblance to work in psychology, but di ers considerably in the details and in the use of the word \reinforcement." The paper discusses central issues of reinforcement learning, including trading o exploration and exploitation, establishing the foundations of the eld via Markov decision theory, learning from delayed reinforcement, constructing empirical models to accelerate learning, making use of generalization and hierarchy, and coping with hidden state. It concludes with a survey of some implemented systems and an assessment of the practical utility of current methods for reinforcement learning.

Constructing agents with planning capabilities has long been one of the main challenges in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Tree-based planning methods have enjoyed huge success in challenging domains, such as chess and Go, where a perfect simulator is available. However, in real-world problems the dynamics governing the environment are often complex and unknown. In this work we present the MuZero algorithm which, by combining a tree-based search with a learned model, achieves superhuman performance in a range of challenging and visually complex domains, without any knowledge of their underlying dynamics. MuZero learns a model that, when applied iteratively, predicts the quantities most directly relevant to planning: the reward, the action-selection policy, and the value function. When evaluated on 57 different Atari games -the canonical video game environment for testing AI techniques, in which model-based planning approaches have historically struggled -our new algorithm achieved a new state of the art. When evaluated on Go, chess and shogi, without any knowledge of the game rules, MuZero matched the superhuman performance of the AlphaZero algorithm that was supplied with the game rules.

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。

钢筋学习中的时间抽象是代理学习和使用高级行为的能力，称为选项。选项 - 批评架构提供了一种基于渐变的端到端学习方法来构建选项。我们提出了一种基于关注的扩展到该框架，这使得代理能够学会在观察空间的不同方面上集中不同的选择。我们表明这导致行为各种选项，这些选项也能够出现状态抽象，并防止在选项 - 评论家中发生的选项统治和频繁选项切换的退化问题，同时实现类似的样本复杂性。我们还通过不同的转移学习任务，展示了学习选项的更有效，可意识形态和可重复使用的性质。实验结果在一个相对简单的四室环境和更复杂的ALE（街机学习环境）展示了我们方法的功效。

在现实世界中经营通常需要代理商来了解复杂的环境，并应用这种理解以实现一系列目标。这个问题被称为目标有条件的强化学习（GCRL），对长地平线的目标变得特别具有挑战性。目前的方法通过使用基于图形的规划算法增强目标条件的策略来解决这个问题。然而，他们努力缩放到大型高维状态空间，并采用用于有效地收集训练数据的探索机制。在这项工作中，我们介绍了继任者功能标志性（SFL），这是一种探索大型高维环境的框架，以获得熟练的政策熟练的策略。 SFL利用继承特性（SF）来捕获转换动态的能力，通过估计状态新颖性来驱动探索，并通过将状态空间作为基于非参数标志的图形来实现高级规划。我们进一步利用SF直接计算地标遍历的目标条件调节策略，我们用于在探索状态空间边缘执行计划“前沿”地标。我们在我们的Minigrid和VizDoom进行了实验，即SFL可以高效地探索大型高维状态空间和优于长地平线GCRL任务的最先进的基线。

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely believed to have the potential to improve sample efficiency by allowing an agent to synthesize large amounts of imagined experience. Experience Replay (ER) can be considered a simple kind of model, which has proved extremely effective at improving the stability and efficiency of deep RL. In principle, a learned parametric model could improve on ER by generalizing from real experience to augment the dataset with additional plausible experience. However, owing to the many design choices involved in empirically successful algorithms, it can be very hard to establish where the benefits are actually coming from. Here, we provide theoretical and empirical insight into when, and how, we can expect data generated by a learned model to be useful. First, we provide a general theorem motivating how learning a model as an intermediate step can narrow down the set of possible value functions more than learning a value function directly from data using the Bellman equation. Second, we provide an illustrative example showing empirically how a similar effect occurs in a more concrete setting with neural network function approximation. Finally, we provide extensive experiments showing the benefit of model-based learning for online RL in environments with combinatorial complexity, but factored structure that allows a learned model to generalize. In these experiments, we take care to control for other factors in order to isolate, insofar as possible, the benefit of using experience generated by a learned model relative to ER alone.