C-GAIL: Stabilizing Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning with Control Theory

Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) trains a generative policy to mimic a demonstrator. It uses on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize a reward signal derived from a GAN-like discriminator. A major drawback of GAIL is its training instability - it inherits the complex training dynamics of GANs, and the distribution shift introduced by RL. This can cause oscillations during training, harming its sample efficiency and final policy performance. Recent work has shown that control theory can help with the convergence of a GAN's training. This paper extends this line of work, conducting a control-theoretic analysis of GAIL and deriving a novel controller that not only pushes GAIL to the desired equilibrium but also achieves asymptotic stability in a 'one-step' setting. Based on this, we propose a practical algorithm 'Controlled-GAIL' (C-GAIL). On MuJoCo tasks, our controlled variant is able to speed up the rate of convergence, reduce the range of oscillation and match the expert's distribution more closely both for vanilla GAIL and GAIL-DAC.

Noise Contrastive Alignment of Language Models with Explicit Rewards

User intentions are typically formalized as evaluation rewards to be maximized when fine-tuning language models (LMs). Existing alignment methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are mainly tailored for pairwise preference data where rewards are implicitly defined rather than explicitly given. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for LM alignment, leveraging Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) to bridge the gap in handling reward datasets explicitly annotated with scalar evaluations. Our framework comprises two parallel algorithms, NCA and InfoNCA, both enabling the direct extraction of an LM policy from reward data as well as preference data. Notably, we show that the DPO loss is a special case of our proposed InfoNCA objective under pairwise preference settings, thereby integrating and extending current alignment theories. By contrasting NCA and InfoNCA, we show that InfoNCA and DPO adjust relative likelihood across different responses to a single instruction, while NCA optimizes absolute likelihood for each response. We apply our methods to align a 7B language model with a GPT-4 annotated reward dataset. Experimental results suggest that InfoNCA surpasses the DPO baseline in GPT-4 evaluations, while NCA enjoys better training stability with competitive performance.

Score Regularized Policy Optimization through Diffusion Behavior

Recent developments in offline reinforcement learning have uncovered the immense potential of diffusion modeling, which excels at representing heterogeneous behavior policies. However, sampling from diffusion policies is considerably slow because it necessitates tens to hundreds of iterative inference steps for one action. To address this issue, we propose to extract an efficient deterministic inference policy from critic models and pretrained diffusion behavior models, leveraging the latter to directly regularize the policy gradient with the behavior distribution's score function during optimization. Our method enjoys powerful generative capabilities of diffusion modeling while completely circumventing the computationally intensive and time-consuming diffusion sampling scheme, both during training and evaluation. Extensive results on D4RL tasks show that our method boosts action sampling speed by more than 25 times compared with various leading diffusion-based methods in locomotion tasks, while still maintaining state-of-the-art performance.

Contrastive Energy Prediction for Exact Energy-Guided Diffusion Sampling in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Guided sampling is a vital approach for applying diffusion models in real-world tasks that embeds human-defined guidance during the sampling procedure. This paper considers a general setting where the guidance is defined by an (unnormalized) energy function. The main challenge for this setting is that the intermediate guidance during the diffusion sampling procedure, which is jointly defined by the sampling distribution and the energy function, is unknown and is hard to estimate. To address this challenge, we propose an exact formulation of the intermediate guidance as well as a novel training objective named contrastive energy prediction (CEP) to learn the exact guidance. Our method is guaranteed to converge to the exact guidance under unlimited model capacity and data samples, while previous methods can not. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by applying it to offline reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive experiments on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms. We also provide some examples of applying CEP for image synthesis to demonstrate the scalability of CEP on high-dimensional data.

Offline Reinforcement Learning via High-Fidelity Generative Behavior Modeling

In offline reinforcement learning, weighted regression is a common method to ensure the learned policy stays close to the behavior policy and to prevent selecting out-of-sample actions. In this work, we show that due to the limited distributional expressivity of policy models, previous methods might still select unseen actions during training, which deviates from their initial motivation. To address this problem, we adopt a generative approach by decoupling the learned policy into two parts: an expressive generative behavior model and an action evaluation model. The key insight is that such decoupling avoids learning an explicitly parameterized policy model with a closed-form expression. Directly learning the behavior policy allows us to leverage existing advances in generative modeling, such as diffusion-based methods, to model diverse behaviors. As for action evaluation, we combine our method with an in-sample planning technique to further avoid selecting out-of-sample actions and increase computational efficiency. Experimental results on D4RL datasets show that our proposed method achieves competitive or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art offline RL methods, especially in complex tasks such as AntMaze. We also empirically demonstrate that our method can successfully learn from a heterogeneous dataset containing multiple distinctive but similarly successful strategies, whereas previous unimodal policies fail.

Weight-based Channel-model Matrix Framework: a reasonable solution for EEG-based cross-dataset emotion recognition

Cross-dataset emotion recognition as an extremely challenging task in the field of EEG-based affective computing is influenced by many factors, which make the universal models yield unsatisfactory results. Facing the situation that lack of EEG information decoding researches, we first analyzed the impact of different EEG information(individual, session, emotion, trial) to emotion recognition by sample space visualization, sample aggregation phenomenon quantification, and energy pattern analysis on five public datasets. And based on these phenomena and patterns, we provided the processing methods and interpretable work of various EEG differences. Through the analysis of emotional feature distribution patterns, Individual Emotional Feature Distribution Difference(IEFDD) was found. After analyzing the limitations of traditional modeling approach suffering from IEFDD, we proposed the Weight-based Channel-model Matrix Framework(WCMF). In order to characterize emotional feature distribution patterns reasonably, four weight extraction methods were designed, and the optimal of them is Correction T-test(CT) weight extraction method. Finally, the performance of WCMF was validated on cross-dataset tasks in two kinds of experiments that simulated different practical scenarios, the results showed WCMF had more stable and better emotion recognition ability.

Tianshou: a Highly Modularized Deep Reinforcement Learning Library

We present Tianshou, a highly modularized python library for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that uses PyTorch as its backend. Tianshou aims to provide building blocks to replicate common RL experiments and has officially supported more than 15 classic algorithms succinctly. To facilitate related research and prove Tianshou's reliability, we release Tianshou's benchmark of MuJoCo environments, covering 9 classic algorithms and 9/13 Mujoco tasks with state-of-the-art performance. We open-sourced Tianshou at https://github.com/thu-ml/tianshou/, which has received over 3k stars and become one of the most popular PyTorch-based DRL libraries.

A study of resting-state EEG biomarkers for depression recognition

Background: Depression has become a major health burden worldwide, and effective detection depression is a great public-health challenge. This Electroencephalography (EEG)-based research is to explore the effective biomarkers for depression recognition. Methods: Resting state EEG data was collected from 24 major depressive patients (MDD) and 29 normal controls using 128 channel HydroCel Geodesic Sensor Net (HCGSN). To better identify depression, we extracted different types of EEG features including linear features, nonlinear features and functional connectivity features phase lagging index (PLI) to comprehensively analyze the EEG signals in patients with MDD. And using different feature selection methods and classifiers to evaluate the optimal feature sets. Results: Functional connectivity feature PLI is superior to the linear features and nonlinear features. And when combining all the types of features to classify MDD patients, we can obtain the highest classification accuracy 82.31% using ReliefF feature selection method and logistic regression (LR) classifier. Analyzing the distribution of optimal feature set, it was found that intrahemispheric connection edges of PLI were much more than the interhemispheric connection edges, and the intrahemispheric connection edges had a significant differences between two groups. Conclusion: Functional connectivity feature PLI plays an important role in depression recognition. Especially, intrahemispheric connection edges of PLI might be an effective biomarker to identify depression. And statistic results suggested that MDD patients might exist functional dysfunction in left hemisphere.