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Meta-learning is a powerful tool that builds on multi-task learning to learn how to quickly adapt a model to new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms can acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by meta-learning prior tasks. The performance of meta-learning algorithms critically depends on the tasks available for meta-training: in the same way that supervised learning algorithms generalize best to test points drawn from the same distribution as the training points, meta-learning methods generalize best to tasks from the same distribution as the meta-training tasks. In effect, meta-reinforcement learning offloads the design burden from algorithm design to task design. If we can automate the process of task design as well, we can devise a meta-learning algorithm that is truly automated. In this work, we take a step in this direction, proposing a family of unsupervised meta-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning. We describe a general recipe for unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning, and describe an effective instantiation of this approach based on a recently proposed unsupervised exploration technique and model-agnostic meta-learning. We also discuss practical and conceptual considerations for developing unsupervised meta-learning methods. Our experimental results demonstrate that unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning effectively acquires accelerated reinforcement learning procedures without the need for manual task design, significantly exceeds the performance of learning from scratch, and even matches performance of meta-learning methods that use hand-specified task distributions.

Imitation learning algorithms provide a simple and straightforward approach for training control policies via supervised learning. By maximizing the likelihood of good actions provided by an expert demonstrator, supervised imitation learning can produce effective policies without the algorithmic complexities and optimization challenges of reinforcement learning, at the cost of requiring an expert demonstrator to provide the demonstrations. In this paper, we ask: can we take insights from imitation learning to design algorithms that can effectively acquire optimal policies from scratch without any expert demonstrations? The key observation that makes this possible is that, in the multi-task setting, trajectories that are generated by a suboptimal policy can still serve as optimal examples for other tasks. In particular, when tasks correspond to different goals, every trajectory is a successful demonstration for the goal state that it actually reaches. We propose a simple algorithm for learning goal-reaching behaviors without any demonstrations, complicated user-provided reward functions, or complex reinforcement learning methods. Our method simply maximizes the likelihood of actions the agent actually took in its own previous rollouts, conditioned on the goal being the state that it actually reached. Although related variants of this approach have been proposed previously in imitation learning with demonstrations, we show how this approach can effectively learn goal-reaching policies from scratch. We present a theoretical result linking self-supervised imitation learning and reinforcement learning, and empirical results showing that it performs competitively with more complex reinforcement learning methods on a range of challenging goal reaching problems, while yielding advantages in terms of stability and use of offline data.

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We propose a simple, practical, and intuitive approach for domain adaptation in reinforcement learning. Our approach stems from the idea that the agent's experience in the source domain should look similar to its experience in the target domain. Building off of a probabilistic view of RL, we formally show that we can achieve this goal by compensating for the difference in dynamics by modifying the reward function. This modified reward function is simple to estimate by learning auxiliary classifiers that distinguish source-domain transitions from target-domain transitions. Intuitively, the modified reward function penalizes the agent for visiting states and taking actions in the source domain which are not possible in the target domain. Said another way, the agent is penalized for transitions that would indicate that the agent is interacting with the source domain, rather than the target domain. Our approach is applicable to domains with continuous states and actions and does not require learning an explicit model of the dynamics. On discrete and continuous control tasks, we illustrate the mechanics of our approach and demonstrate its scalability to high-dimensional tasks. * Equal contribution.Preprint. Under review.

Safety is an essential component for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios, and is critical during the learning process itself. A natural first approach toward safe RL is to manually specify constraints on the policy's behavior. However, just as learning has enabled progress in large-scale development of AI systems, learning safety specifications may also be necessary to ensure safety in messy open-world environments where manual safety specifications cannot scale. Akin to how humans learn incrementally starting in child-safe environments, we propose to learn how to be safe in one set of tasks and environments, and then use that learned intuition to constrain future behaviors when learning new, modified tasks. We empirically study this form of safety-constrained transfer learning in three challenging domains: simulated navigation, quadruped locomotion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. In comparison to standard deep RL techniques and prior approaches to safe RL, we find that our method enables the learning of new tasks and in new environments with both substantially fewer safety incidents, such as falling or dropping an object, and faster, more stable learning. This suggests a path forward not only for safer RL systems, but also for more effective RL systems.

The history of learning for control has been an exciting back and forth between two broad classes of algorithms: planning and reinforcement learning. Planning algorithms effectively reason over long horizons, but assume access to a local policy and distance metric over collision-free paths. Reinforcement learning excels at learning policies and the relative values of states, but fails to plan over long horizons. Despite the successes of each method in various domains, tasks that require reasoning over long horizons with limited feedback and high-dimensional observations remain exceedingly challenging for both planning and reinforcement learning algorithms. Frustratingly, these sorts of tasks are potentially the most useful, as they are simple to design (a human only need to provide an example goal state) and avoid reward shaping, which can bias the agent towards finding a sub-optimal solution. We introduce a general-purpose control algorithm that combines the strengths of planning and reinforcement learning to effectively solve these tasks. Our aim is to decompose the task of reaching a distant goal state into a sequence of easier tasks, each of which corresponds to reaching a particular subgoal. Planning algorithms can automatically find these waypoints, but only if provided with suitable abstractions of the environment -namely, a graph consisting of nodes and edges. Our main insight is that this graph can be constructed via reinforcement learning, where a goal-conditioned value function provides edge weights, and nodes are taken to be previously seen observations in a replay buffer. Using graph search over our replay buffer, we can automatically generate this sequence of subgoals, even in image-based environments. Our algorithm, search on the replay buffer (SoRB), enables agents to solve sparse reward tasks over one hundred steps, and generalizes substantially better than standard RL algorithms. 1 Recent work has introduced goal-conditioned RL algorithms (Pong et al., 2018;Schaul et al., 2015) that acquire a single policy for reaching many goals.