Transductive Reward Inference on Graph

In this study, we present a transductive inference approach on that reward information propagation graph, which enables the effective estimation of rewards for unlabelled data in offline reinforcement learning. Reward inference is the key to learning effective policies in practical scenarios, while direct environmental interactions are either too costly or unethical and the reward functions are rarely accessible, such as in healthcare and robotics. Our research focuses on developing a reward inference method based on the contextual properties of information propagation on graphs that capitalizes on a constrained number of human reward annotations to infer rewards for unlabelled data. We leverage both the available data and limited reward annotations to construct a reward propagation graph, wherein the edge weights incorporate various influential factors pertaining to the rewards. Subsequently, we employ the constructed graph for transductive reward inference, thereby estimating rewards for unlabelled data. Furthermore, we establish the existence of a fixed point during several iterations of the transductive inference process and demonstrate its at least convergence to a local optimum. Empirical evaluations on locomotion and robotic manipulation tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach. The application of our inferred rewards improves the performance in offline reinforcement learning tasks.

Policy Dispersion in Non-Markovian Environment

Markov Decision Process (MDP) presents a mathematical framework to formulate the learning processes of agents in reinforcement learning. MDP is limited by the Markovian assumption that a reward only depends on the immediate state and action. However, a reward sometimes depends on the history of states and actions, which may result in the decision process in a non-Markovian environment. In such environments, agents receive rewards via temporally-extended behaviors sparsely, and the learned policies may be similar. This leads the agents acquired with similar policies generally overfit to the given task and can not quickly adapt to perturbations of environments. To resolve this problem, this paper tries to learn the diverse policies from the history of state-action pairs under a non-Markovian environment, in which a policy dispersion scheme is designed for seeking diverse policy representation. Specifically, we first adopt a transformer-based method to learn policy embeddings. Then, we stack the policy embeddings to construct a dispersion matrix to induce a set of diverse policies. Finally, we prove that if the dispersion matrix is positive definite, the dispersed embeddings can effectively enlarge the disagreements across policies, yielding a diverse expression for the original policy embedding distribution. Experimental results show that this dispersion scheme can obtain more expressive diverse policies, which then derive more robust performance than recent learning baselines under various learning environments.