We study an important yet under-addressed problem of quickly and safely improving policies in online reinforcement learning domains. As its solution, we propose a novel exploration strategy - diverse exploration (DE), which learns and deploys a diverse set of safe policies to explore the environment. We provide DE theory explaining why diversity in behavior policies enables effective exploration without sacrificing exploitation. Our empirical study shows that an online policy improvement algorithm framework implementing the DE strategy can achieve both fast policy improvement and safe online performance.
Some recent studies on safe exploration @cite_19 @cite_17 @cite_11 @cite_18 @cite_22 provide safety guarantees during exploration. Their notion of safety is to avoid unsafe states and actions which can cause catastrophic failures in safety critical applications. In contrast, our notion of safety in this paper is defined at the policy level instead of the state and action level. A safe policy must perform at least as well as a baseline policy. A recent work on deep exploration @cite_9 alluded to a similar idea of exploring the environment through a diverse set of policies, but it does not address the safety issue. Recent advances in approximate policy iteration have produced safe policy improvement methods such as conservative policy iteration @cite_1 and its derivatives @cite_6 @cite_3 , and off-policy methods @cite_24 @cite_13 @cite_23 which decide safe policies based on samples or model estimates from past behavior policies. These methods do not perform active exploration during policy improvement. Manipulating behavior distributions has been explored but with the objective to find an optimal behavior policy to use as a proposal policy for a known target policy @cite_16 .
@cite_18 @cite_22 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_17 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_23 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_11
2616964725 2739747865 2280163991 1575592356 2367669080 2112583795 2234859443 1840625103 2963836326 2952720101
For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact with or around humans should satisfy safety constraints. Recent advances in policy search algorithms (, 2016, , 2015, , 2016, , 2016) have enabled new capabilities in high-dimensional control, but do not consider the constrained setting. We propose Constrained Policy Optimization (CPO), the first general-purpose policy search algorithm for constrained reinforcement learning with guarantees for near-constraint satisfaction at each iteration. Our method allows us to train neural network policies for high-dimensional control while making guarantees about policy behavior all throughout training. Our guarantees are based on a new theoretical result, which is of independent interest: we prove a bound relating the expected returns of two policies to an average divergence between them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on simulated robot locomotion tasks where the agent must satisfy constraints motivated by safety. Efficient exploration in complex environments remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. We propose bootstrapped DQN, a simple algorithm that explores in a computationally and statistically efficient manner through use of randomized value functions. Unlike dithering strategies such as epsilon-greedy exploration, bootstrapped DQN carries out temporally-extended (or deep) exploration; this can lead to exponentially faster learning. We demonstrate these benefits in complex stochastic MDPs and in the large-scale Arcade Learning Environment. Bootstrapped DQN substantially improves learning times and performance across most Atari games. We introduce a simple, efficient method that improves stochastic policies for Markov decision processes. The computational complexity is the same as that of the value estimation problem. We prove that when the value estimation error is small, this method gives an improvement in performance that increases with certain variance properties of the initial policy and transition dynamics. Performance in numerical experiments compares favorably with previous policy improvement algorithms. This paper presents a study of the policy improvement step that can be usefully exploited by approximate policy-iteration algorithms. When either the policy evaluation step or the policy improvement step returns an approximated result, the sequence of policies produced by policy iteration may not be monotonically increasing, and oscillations may occur. To address this issue, we consider safe policy improvements, i.e., at each iteration we search for a policy that maximizes a lower bound to the policy improvement w.r.t. the current policy. When no improving policy can be found the algorithm stops. We propose two safe policy-iteration algorithms that differ in the way the next policy is chosen w.r.t. the estimated greedy policy. Besides being theoretically derived and discussed, the proposed algorithms are empirically evaluated and compared with state-of-the-art approaches on some chain-walk domains and on the Blackjack card game. We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL in real-world problems. Despite its importance, existing general methods either have uncontrolled bias or suffer high variance. In this work, we extend the doubly robust estimator for bandits to sequential decision-making problems, which gets the best of both worlds: it is guaranteed to be unbiased and can have a much lower variance than the popular importance sampling estimators. We demonstrate the estimator's accuracy in several benchmark problems, and illustrate its use as a subroutine in safe policy improvement. We also provide theoretical results on the hardness of the problem, and show that our estimator can match the lower bound in certain scenarios. In this paper, we consider the important problem of safe exploration in reinforcement learning. While reinforcement learning is well-suited to domains with complex transition dynamics and high-dimensional state-action spaces, an additional challenge is posed by the need for safe and efficient exploration. Traditional exploration techniques are not particularly useful for solving dangerous tasks, where the trial and error process may lead to the selection of actions whose execution in some states may result in damage to the learning system (or any other system). Consequently, when an agent begins an interaction with a dangerous and high-dimensional state-action space, an important question arises; namely, that of how to avoid (or at least minimize) damage caused by the exploration of the state-action space. We introduce the PI-SRL algorithm which safely improves suboptimal albeit robust behaviors for continuous state and action control tasks and which efficiently learns from the experience gained from the environment. We evaluate the proposed method in four complex tasks: automatic car parking, pole-balancing, helicopter hovering, and business management. An important problem in sequential decision-making under uncertainty is to use limited data to compute a safe policy, i.e., a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as a given baseline strategy. In this paper, we develop and analyze a new model-based approach to compute a safe policy when we have access to an inaccurate dynamics model of the system with known accuracy guarantees. Our proposed robust method uses this (inaccurate) model to directly minimize the (negative) regret w.r.t. the baseline policy. Contrary to the existing approaches, minimizing the regret allows one to improve the baseline policy in states with accurate dynamics and seamlessly fall back to the baseline policy, otherwise. We show that our formulation is NP-hard and propose an approximate algorithm. Our empirical results on several domains show that even this relatively simple approximate algorithm can significantly outperform standard approaches. In environments with uncertain dynamics exploration is necessary to learn how to perform well. Existing reinforcement learning algorithms provide strong exploration guarantees, but they tend to rely on an ergodicity assumption. The essence of ergodicity is that any state is eventually reachable from any other state by following a suitable policy. This assumption allows for exploration algorithms that operate by simply favoring states that have rarely been visited before. For most physical systems this assumption is impractical as the systems would break before any reasonable exploration has taken place, i.e., most physical systems don't satisfy the ergodicity assumption. In this paper we address the need for safe exploration methods in Markov decision processes. We first propose a general formulation of safety through ergodicity. We show that imposing safety by restricting attention to the resulting set of guaranteed safe policies is NP-hard. We then present an efficient algorithm for guaranteed safe, but potentially suboptimal, exploration. At the core is an optimization formulation in which the constraints restrict attention to a subset of the guaranteed safe policies and the objective favors exploration policies. Our framework is compatible with the majority of previously proposed exploration methods, which rely on an exploration bonus. Our experiments, which include a Martian terrain exploration problem, show that our method is able to explore better than classical exploration methods.