Optimistic Model Rollouts for Pessimistic Offline Policy Optimization

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress, offering a promising avenue for improving generalization with synthetic model rollouts. Existing works primarily focus on incorporating pessimism for policy optimization, usually via constructing a Pessimistic Markov Decision Process (P-MDP). However, the P-MDP discourages the policies from learning in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions beyond the support of offline datasets, which can under-utilize the generalization ability of dynamics models. In contrast, we propose constructing an Optimistic MDP (O-MDP). We initially observed the potential benefits of optimism brought by encouraging more OOD rollouts. Motivated by this observation, we present ORPO, a simple yet effective model-based offline RL framework. ORPO generates Optimistic model Rollouts for Pessimistic offline policy Optimization. Specifically, we train an optimistic rollout policy in the O-MDP to sample more OOD model rollouts. Then we relabel the sampled state-action pairs with penalized rewards and optimize the output policy in the P-MDP. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the performance of policies trained with ORPO can be lower-bounded in linear MDPs. Experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms P-MDP baselines by a margin of 30%, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the widely-used benchmark. Moreover, ORPO exhibits notable advantages in problems that require generalization.

Uncertainty-Penalized Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with Diverse Reward LoRA Ensembles

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) emerges as a promising paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, a notable challenge in RLHF is overoptimization, where beyond a certain threshold, the pursuit of higher rewards leads to a decline in human preferences. In this paper, we observe the weakness of KL regularization which is commonly employed in existing RLHF methods to address overoptimization. To mitigate this limitation, we scrutinize the RLHF objective in the offline dataset and propose uncertainty-penalized RLHF (UP-RLHF), which incorporates uncertainty regularization during RL-finetuning. To enhance the uncertainty quantification abilities for reward models, we first propose a diverse low-rank adaptation (LoRA) ensemble by maximizing the nuclear norm of LoRA matrix concatenations. Then we optimize policy models utilizing penalized rewards, determined by both rewards and uncertainties provided by the diverse reward LoRA ensembles. Our experimental results, based on two real human preference datasets, showcase the effectiveness of diverse reward LoRA ensembles in quantifying reward uncertainty. Additionally, uncertainty regularization in UP-RLHF proves to be pivotal in mitigating overoptimization, thereby contributing to the overall performance.

Self-Supervised Exploration via Temporal Inconsistency in Reinforcement Learning

In real-world scenarios, reinforcement learning under sparse-reward synergistic settings has remained challenging, despite surging interests in this field. Previous attempts suggest that intrinsic reward can alleviate the issue caused by sparsity. In this paper, we present a novel intrinsic reward that is inspired by human learning, as humans evaluate curiosity by comparing current observations with historical knowledge. Specifically, we train a self-supervised prediction model and save a set of snapshots of the model parameters, without incurring addition training cost. Then we employ nuclear norm to evaluate the temporal inconsistency between the predictions of different snapshots, which can be further deployed as the intrinsic reward. Moreover, a variational weighting mechanism is proposed to assign weight to different snapshots in an adaptive manner. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in various benchmark environments. The results suggest that our method can provide overwhelming state-of-the-art performance compared with other intrinsic reward-based methods, without incurring additional training costs and maintaining higher noise tolerance. Our code will be released publicly to enhance reproducibility.

Dynamic Memory-based Curiosity: A Bootstrap Approach for Exploration

The sparsity of extrinsic rewards poses a serious challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Currently, many efforts have been made on curiosity which can provide a representative intrinsic reward for effective exploration. However, the challenge is still far from being solved. In this paper, we present a novel curiosity for RL, named DyMeCu, which stands for Dynamic Memory-based Curiosity. Inspired by human curiosity and information theory, DyMeCu consists of a dynamic memory and dual online learners. The curiosity arouses if memorized information can not deal with the current state, and the information gap between dual learners can be formulated as the intrinsic reward for agents, and then such state information can be consolidated into the dynamic memory. Compared with previous curiosity methods, DyMeCu can better mimic human curiosity with dynamic memory, and the memory module can be dynamically grown based on a bootstrap paradigm with dual learners. On multiple benchmarks including DeepMind Control Suite and Atari Suite, large-scale empirical experiments are conducted and the results demonstrate that DyMeCu outperforms competitive curiosity-based methods with or without extrinsic rewards. We will release the code to enhance reproducibility.

Nuclear Norm Maximization Based Curiosity-Driven Learning

To handle the sparsity of the extrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning, researchers have proposed intrinsic reward which enables the agent to learn the skills that might come in handy for pursuing the rewards in the future, such as encouraging the agent to visit novel states. However, the intrinsic reward can be noisy due to the undesirable environment's stochasticity and directly applying the noisy value predictions to supervise the policy is detrimental to improve the learning performance and efficiency. Moreover, many previous studies employ $\ell^2$ norm or variance to measure the exploration novelty, which will amplify the noise due to the square operation. In this paper, we address aforementioned challenges by proposing a novel curiosity leveraging the nuclear norm maximization (NNM), which can quantify the novelty of exploring the environment more accurately while providing high-tolerance to the noise and outliers. We conduct extensive experiments across a variety of benchmark environments and the results suggest that NNM can provide state-of-the-art performance compared with previous curiosity methods. On 26 Atari games subset, when trained with only intrinsic reward, NNM achieves a human-normalized score of 1.09, which doubles that of competitive intrinsic rewards-based approaches. Our code will be released publicly to enhance the reproducibility.

FINT: Field-aware INTeraction Neural Network For CTR Prediction

As a critical component for online advertising and marking, click-through rate (CTR) prediction has draw lots of attentions from both industry and academia field. Recently, the deep learning has become the mainstream methodological choice for CTR. Despite of sustainable efforts have been made, existing approaches still pose several challenges. On the one hand, high-order interaction between the features is under-explored. On the other hand, high-order interactions may neglect the semantic information from the low-order fields. In this paper, we proposed a novel prediction method, named FINT, that employs the Field-aware INTeraction layer which captures high-order feature interactions while retaining the low-order field information. To empirically investigate the effectiveness and robustness of the FINT, we perform extensive experiments on the three realistic databases: KDD2012, Criteo and Avazu. The obtained results demonstrate that the FINT can significantly improve the performance compared to the existing methods, without increasing the amount of computation required. Moreover, the proposed method brought about 2.72\% increase to the advertising revenue of a big online video app through A/B testing. To better promote the research in CTR field, we released our code as well as reference implementation at: https://github.com/zhishan01/FINT.

Collaborative Deep Learning Across Multiple Data Centers

Valuable training data is often owned by independent organizations and located in multiple data centers. Most deep learning approaches require to centralize the multi-datacenter data for performance purpose. In practice, however, it is often infeasible to transfer all data to a centralized data center due to not only bandwidth limitation but also the constraints of privacy regulations. Model averaging is a conventional choice for data parallelized training, but its ineffectiveness is claimed by previous studies as deep neural networks are often non-convex. In this paper, we argue that model averaging can be effective in the decentralized environment by using two strategies, namely, the cyclical learning rate and the increased number of epochs for local model training. With the two strategies, we show that model averaging can provide competitive performance in the decentralized mode compared to the data-centralized one. In a practical environment with multiple data centers, we conduct extensive experiments using state-of-the-art deep network architectures on different types of data. Results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

Sample Dropout for Audio Scene Classification Using Multi-Scale Dense Connected Convolutional Neural Network

Acoustic scene classification is an intricate problem for a machine. As an emerging field of research, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) achieve convincing results. In this paper, we explore the use of multi-scale Dense connected convolutional neural network (DenseNet) for the classification task, with the goal to improve the classification performance as multi-scale features can be extracted from the time-frequency representation of the audio signal. On the other hand, most of previous CNN-based audio scene classification approaches aim to improve the classification accuracy, by employing different regularization techniques, such as the dropout of hidden units and data augmentation, to reduce overfitting. It is widely known that outliers in the training set have a high negative influence on the trained model, and culling the outliers may improve the classification performance, while it is often under-explored in previous studies. In this paper, inspired by the silence removal in the speech signal processing, a novel sample dropout approach is proposed, which aims to remove outliers in the training dataset. Using the DCASE 2017 audio scene classification datasets, the experimental results demonstrates the proposed multi-scale DenseNet providing a superior performance than the traditional single-scale DenseNet, while the sample dropout method can further improve the classification robustness of multi-scale DenseNet.