DecisionNCE: Embodied Multimodal Representations via Implicit Preference Learning

Multimodal pretraining has emerged as an effective strategy for the trinity of goals of representation learning in autonomous robots: 1) extracting both local and global task progression information; 2) enforcing temporal consistency of visual representation; 3) capturing trajectory-level language grounding. Most existing methods approach these via separate objectives, which often reach sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a universal unified objective that can simultaneously extract meaningful task progression information from image sequences and seamlessly align them with language instructions. We discover that via implicit preferences, where a visual trajectory inherently aligns better with its corresponding language instruction than mismatched pairs, the popular Bradley-Terry model can transform into representation learning through proper reward reparameterizations. The resulted framework, DecisionNCE, mirrors an InfoNCE-style objective but is distinctively tailored for decision-making tasks, providing an embodied representation learning framework that elegantly extracts both local and global task progression features, with temporal consistency enforced through implicit time contrastive learning, while ensuring trajectory-level instruction grounding via multimodal joint encoding. Evaluation on both simulated and real robots demonstrates that DecisionNCE effectively facilitates diverse downstream policy learning tasks, offering a versatile solution for unified representation and reward learning. Project Page: https://2toinf.github.io/DecisionNCE/

Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning with Feasibility-Guided Diffusion Model

Safe offline RL is a promising way to bypass risky online interactions towards safe policy learning. Most existing methods only enforce soft constraints, i.e., constraining safety violations in expectation below thresholds predetermined. This can lead to potentially unsafe outcomes, thus unacceptable in safety-critical scenarios. An alternative is to enforce the hard constraint of zero violation. However, this can be challenging in offline setting, as it needs to strike the right balance among three highly intricate and correlated aspects: safety constraint satisfaction, reward maximization, and behavior regularization imposed by offline datasets. Interestingly, we discover that via reachability analysis of safe-control theory, the hard safety constraint can be equivalently translated to identifying the largest feasible region given the offline dataset. This seamlessly converts the original trilogy problem to a feasibility-dependent objective, i.e., maximizing reward value within the feasible region while minimizing safety risks in the infeasible region. Inspired by these, we propose FISOR (FeasIbility-guided Safe Offline RL), which allows safety constraint adherence, reward maximization, and offline policy learning to be realized via three decoupled processes, while offering strong safety performance and stability. In FISOR, the optimal policy for the translated optimization problem can be derived in a special form of weighted behavior cloning. Thus, we propose a novel energy-guided diffusion model that does not require training a complicated time-dependent classifier to extract the policy, greatly simplifying the training. We compare FISOR against baselines on DSRL benchmark for safe offline RL. Evaluation results show that FISOR is the only method that can guarantee safety satisfaction in all tasks, while achieving top returns in most tasks.

A Fully Data-Driven Approach for Realistic Traffic Signal Control Using Offline Reinforcement Learning

The optimization of traffic signal control (TSC) is critical for an efficient transportation system. In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have emerged as a popular approach for TSC and show promising results for highly adaptive control. However, existing RL-based methods suffer from notably poor real-world applicability and hardly have any successful deployments. The reasons for such failures are mostly due to the reliance on over-idealized traffic simulators for policy optimization, as well as using unrealistic fine-grained state observations and reward signals that are not directly obtainable from real-world sensors. In this paper, we propose a fully Data-Driven and simulator-free framework for realistic Traffic Signal Control (D2TSC). Specifically, we combine well-established traffic flow theory with machine learning to construct a reward inference model to infer the reward signals from coarse-grained traffic data. With the inferred rewards, we further propose a sample-efficient offline RL method to enable direct signal control policy learning from historical offline datasets of real-world intersections. To evaluate our approach, we collect historical traffic data from a real-world intersection, and develop a highly customized simulation environment that strictly follows real data characteristics. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our approach achieves superior performance over conventional and offline RL baselines, and also enjoys much better real-world applicability.

Query-Policy Misalignment in Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods focus on selecting queries to maximally improve the overall quality of the reward model, but counter-intuitively, we find that this may not necessarily lead to improved performance. To unravel this mystery, we identify a long-neglected issue in the query selection schemes of existing PbRL studies: Query-Policy Misalignment. We show that the seemingly informative queries selected to improve the overall quality of reward model actually may not align with RL agents' interests, thus offering little help on policy learning and eventually resulting in poor feedback efficiency. We show that this issue can be effectively addressed via near on-policy query and a specially designed hybrid experience replay, which together enforce the bidirectional query-policy alignment. Simple yet elegant, our method can be easily incorporated into existing approaches by changing only a few lines of code. We showcase in comprehensive experiments that our method achieves substantial gains in both human feedback and RL sample efficiency, demonstrating the importance of addressing query-policy misalignment in PbRL tasks.

PROTO: Iterative Policy Regularized Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL), by combining the benefits of offline pretraining and online finetuning, promises enhanced sample efficiency and policy performance. However, existing methods, effective as they are, suffer from suboptimal performance, limited adaptability, and unsatisfactory computational efficiency. We propose a novel framework, PROTO, which overcomes the aforementioned limitations by augmenting the standard RL objective with an iteratively evolving regularization term. Performing a trust-region-style update, PROTO yields stable initial finetuning and optimal final performance by gradually evolving the regularization term to relax the constraint strength. By adjusting only a few lines of code, PROTO can bridge any offline policy pretraining and standard off-policy RL finetuning to form a powerful offline-to-online RL pathway, birthing great adaptability to diverse methods. Simple yet elegant, PROTO imposes minimal additional computation and enables highly efficient online finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PROTO achieves superior performance over SOTA baselines, offering an adaptable and efficient offline-to-online RL framework.

Offline RL with No OOD Actions: In-Sample Learning via Implicit Value Regularization

Most offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods suffer from the trade-off between improving the policy to surpass the behavior policy and constraining the policy to limit the deviation from the behavior policy as computing $Q$-values using out-of-distribution (OOD) actions will suffer from errors due to distributional shift. The recently proposed \textit{In-sample Learning} paradigm (i.e., IQL), which improves the policy by quantile regression using only data samples, shows great promise because it learns an optimal policy without querying the value function of any unseen actions. However, it remains unclear how this type of method handles the distributional shift in learning the value function. In this work, we make a key finding that the in-sample learning paradigm arises under the \textit{Implicit Value Regularization} (IVR) framework. This gives a deeper understanding of why the in-sample learning paradigm works, i.e., it applies implicit value regularization to the policy. Based on the IVR framework, we further propose two practical algorithms, Sparse $Q$-learning (SQL) and Exponential $Q$-learning (EQL), which adopt the same value regularization used in existing works, but in a complete in-sample manner. Compared with IQL, we find that our algorithms introduce sparsity in learning the value function, making them more robust in noisy data regimes. We also verify the effectiveness of SQL and EQL on D4RL benchmark datasets and show the benefits of in-sample learning by comparing them with CQL in small data regimes.

Mind the Gap: Offline Policy Optimization for Imperfect Rewards

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available, which inflicts substantial performance loss for RL agents. In this study, we propose a unified offline policy optimization approach, \textit{RGM (Reward Gap Minimization)}, which can smartly handle diverse types of imperfect rewards. RGM is formulated as a bi-level optimization problem: the upper layer optimizes a reward correction term that performs visitation distribution matching w.r.t. some expert data; the lower layer solves a pessimistic RL problem with the corrected rewards. By exploiting the duality of the lower layer, we derive a tractable algorithm that enables sampled-based learning without any online interactions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RGM achieves superior performance to existing methods under diverse settings of imperfect rewards. Further, RGM can effectively correct wrong or inconsistent rewards against expert preference and retrieve useful information from biased rewards.

A Policy-Guided Imitation Approach for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generally be categorized into two types: RL-based and Imitation-based. RL-based methods could in principle enjoy out-of-distribution generalization but suffer from erroneous off-policy evaluation. Imitation-based methods avoid off-policy evaluation but are too conservative to surpass the dataset. In this study, we propose an alternative approach, inheriting the training stability of imitation-style methods while still allowing logical out-of-distribution generalization. We decompose the conventional reward-maximizing policy in offline RL into a guide-policy and an execute-policy. During training, the guide-poicy and execute-policy are learned using only data from the dataset, in a supervised and decoupled manner. During evaluation, the guide-policy guides the execute-policy by telling where it should go so that the reward can be maximized, serving as the \textit{Prophet}. By doing so, our algorithm allows \textit{state-compositionality} from the dataset, rather than \textit{action-compositionality} conducted in prior imitation-style methods. We dumb this new approach Policy-guided Offline RL (\texttt{POR}). \texttt{POR} demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on D4RL, a standard benchmark for offline RL. We also highlight the benefits of \texttt{POR} in terms of improving with supplementary suboptimal data and easily adapting to new tasks by only changing the guide-poicy.

Distance-Sensitive Offline Reinforcement Learning

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), one detrimental issue to policy learning is the error accumulation of deep Q function in out-of-distribution (OOD) areas. Unfortunately, existing offline RL methods are often over-conservative, inevitably hurting generalization performance outside data distribution. In our study, one interesting observation is that deep Q functions approximate well inside the convex hull of training data. Inspired by this, we propose a new method, DOGE (Distance-sensitive Offline RL with better GEneralization). DOGE marries dataset geometry with deep function approximators in offline RL, and enables exploitation in generalizable OOD areas rather than strictly constraining policy within data distribution. Specifically, DOGE trains a state-conditioned distance function that can be readily plugged into standard actor-critic methods as a policy constraint. Simple yet elegant, our algorithm enjoys better generalization compared to state-of-the-art methods on D4RL benchmarks. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the superiority of our approach to existing methods that are solely based on data distribution or support constraints.

Offline Reinforcement Learning with Soft Behavior Regularization

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline data. However, these approaches lack guaranteed performance improvement over the behavior policy. In this work, we start from the performance difference between the learned policy and the behavior policy, we derive a new policy learning objective that can be used in the offline setting, which corresponds to the advantage function value of the behavior policy, multiplying by a state-marginal density ratio. We propose a practical way to compute the density ratio and demonstrate its equivalence to a state-dependent behavior regularization. Unlike state-independent regularization used in prior approaches, this \textit{soft} regularization allows more freedom of policy deviation at high confidence states, leading to better performance and stability. We thus term our resulting algorithm Soft Behavior-regularized Actor Critic (SBAC). Our experimental results show that SBAC matches or outperforms the state-of-the-art on a set of continuous control locomotion and manipulation tasks.