Large-Scale Actionless Video Pre-Training via Discrete Diffusion for Efficient Policy Learning

Learning a generalist embodied agent capable of completing multiple tasks poses challenges, primarily stemming from the scarcity of action-labeled robotic datasets. In contrast, a vast amount of human videos exist, capturing intricate tasks and interactions with the physical world. Promising prospects arise for utilizing actionless human videos for pre-training and transferring the knowledge to facilitate robot policy learning through limited robot demonstrations. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that leverages a unified discrete diffusion to combine generative pre-training on human videos and policy fine-tuning on a small number of action-labeled robot videos. We start by compressing both human and robot videos into unified video tokens. In the pre-training stage, we employ a discrete diffusion model with a mask-and-replace diffusion strategy to predict future video tokens in the latent space. In the fine-tuning stage, we harness the imagined future videos to guide low-level action learning trained on a limited set of robot data. Experiments demonstrate that our method generates high-fidelity future videos for planning and enhances the fine-tuned policies compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches with superior generalization ability. Our project website is available at https://video-diff.github.io/.

QGFN: Controllable Greediness with Action Values

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets; GFNs) are a family of reward/energy-based generative methods for combinatorial objects, capable of generating diverse and high-utility samples. However, biasing GFNs towards producing high-utility samples is non-trivial. In this work, we leverage connections between GFNs and reinforcement learning (RL) and propose to combine the GFN policy with an action-value estimate, $Q$, to create greedier sampling policies which can be controlled by a mixing parameter. We show that several variants of the proposed method, QGFN, are able to improve on the number of high-reward samples generated in a variety of tasks without sacrificing diversity.

Evolution Guided Generative Flow Networks

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a family of probabilistic generative models that learn to sample compositional objects proportional to their rewards. One big challenge of GFlowNets is training them effectively when dealing with long time horizons and sparse rewards. To address this, we propose Evolution guided generative flow networks (EGFN), a simple but powerful augmentation to the GFlowNets training using Evolutionary algorithms (EA). Our method can work on top of any GFlowNets training objective, by training a set of agent parameters using EA, storing the resulting trajectories in the prioritized replay buffer, and training the GFlowNets agent using the stored trajectories. We present a thorough investigation over a wide range of toy and real-world benchmark tasks showing the effectiveness of our method in handling long trajectories and sparse rewards.

One is More: Diverse Perspectives within a Single Network for Efficient DRL

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable performance in various domains by leveraging deep neural networks for approximating value functions and policies. However, using neural networks to approximate value functions or policy functions still faces challenges, including low sample efficiency and overfitting. In this paper, we introduce OMNet, a novel learning paradigm utilizing multiple subnetworks within a single network, offering diverse outputs efficiently. We provide a systematic pipeline, including initialization, training, and sampling with OMNet. OMNet can be easily applied to various deep reinforcement learning algorithms with minimal additional overhead. Through comprehensive evaluations conducted on MuJoCo benchmark, our findings highlight OMNet's ability to strike an effective balance between performance and computational cost.

Probabilistic Generative Modeling for Procedural Roundabout Generation for Developing Countries

Due to limited resources and fast economic growth, designing optimal transportation road networks with traffic simulation and validation in a cost-effective manner is vital for developing countries, where extensive manual testing is expensive and often infeasible. Current rule-based road design generators lack diversity, a key feature for design robustness. Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) learn stochastic policies to sample from an unnormalized reward distribution, thus generating high-quality solutions while preserving their diversity. In this work, we formulate the problem of linking incident roads to the circular junction of a roundabout by a Markov decision process, and we leverage GFlowNets as the Junction-Art road generator. We compare our method with related methods and our empirical results show that our method achieves better diversity while preserving a high validity score.

Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow Networks

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects from a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects, which is an important consideration in scientific discovery tasks. However, as they are typically trained from a given extrinsic reward function, it remains an important open challenge about how to leverage the power of pre-training and train GFlowNets in an unsupervised fashion for efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Inspired by recent successes of unsupervised pre-training in various domains, we introduce a novel approach for reward-free pre-training of GFlowNets. By framing the training as a self-supervised problem, we propose an outcome-conditioned GFlowNet (OC-GFN) that learns to explore the candidate space. Specifically, OC-GFN learns to reach any targeted outcomes, akin to goal-conditioned policies in reinforcement learning. We show that the pre-trained OC-GFN model can allow for a direct extraction of a policy capable of sampling from any new reward functions in downstream tasks. Nonetheless, adapting OC-GFN on a downstream task-specific reward involves an intractable marginalization over possible outcomes. We propose a novel way to approximate this marginalization by learning an amortized predictor enabling efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of pre-training the OC-GFN, and its ability to swiftly adapt to downstream tasks and discover modes more efficiently. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pre-training strategies in the context of GFlowNets.

Learning to Scale Logits for Temperature-Conditional GFlowNets

GFlowNets are probabilistic models that learn a stochastic policy that sequentially generates compositional structures, such as molecular graphs. They are trained with the objective of sampling such objects with probability proportional to the object's reward. Among GFlowNets, the temperature-conditional GFlowNets represent a family of policies indexed by temperature, and each is associated with the correspondingly tempered reward function. The major benefit of temperature-conditional GFlowNets is the controllability of GFlowNets' exploration and exploitation through adjusting temperature. We propose Learning to Scale Logits for temperature-conditional GFlowNets (LSL-GFN), a novel architectural design that greatly accelerates the training of temperature-conditional GFlowNets. It is based on the idea that previously proposed temperature-conditioning approaches introduced numerical challenges in the training of the deep network because different temperatures may give rise to very different gradient profiles and ideal scales of the policy's logits. We find that the challenge is greatly reduced if a learned function of the temperature is used to scale the policy's logits directly. We empirically show that our strategy dramatically improves the performances of GFlowNets, outperforming other baselines, including reinforcement learning and sampling methods, in terms of discovering diverse modes in multiple biochemical tasks.

Beyond Conservatism: Diffusion Policies in Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

We present a novel Diffusion Offline Multi-agent Model (DOM2) for offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Different from existing algorithms that rely mainly on conservatism in policy design, DOM2 enhances policy expressiveness and diversity based on diffusion. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion model into the policy network and propose a trajectory-based data-augmentation scheme in training. These key ingredients make our algorithm more robust to environment changes and achieve significant improvements in performance, generalization and data-efficiency. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that DOM2 outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in multi-agent particle and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and generalizes significantly better in shifted environments thanks to its high expressiveness and diversity. Furthermore, DOM2 shows superior data efficiency and can achieve state-of-the-art performance with $20+$ times less data compared to existing algorithms.

Let the Flows Tell: Solving Graph Combinatorial Optimization Problems with GFlowNets

Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are often NP-hard and thus out of reach for exact algorithms, making them a tempting domain to apply machine learning methods. The highly structured constraints in these problems can hinder either optimization or sampling directly in the solution space. On the other hand, GFlowNets have recently emerged as a powerful machinery to efficiently sample from composite unnormalized densities sequentially and have the potential to amortize such solution-searching processes in CO, as well as generate diverse solution candidates. In this paper, we design Markov decision processes (MDPs) for different combinatorial problems and propose to train conditional GFlowNets to sample from the solution space. Efficient training techniques are also developed to benefit long-range credit assignment. Through extensive experiments on a variety of different CO tasks with synthetic and realistic data, we demonstrate that GFlowNet policies can efficiently find high-quality solutions.