An Empirical Study of Implicit Regularization in Deep Offline RL

Deep neural networks are the most commonly used function approximators in offline reinforcement learning. Prior works have shown that neural nets trained with TD-learning and gradient descent can exhibit implicit regularization that can be characterized by under-parameterization of these networks. Specifically, the rank of the penultimate feature layer, also called \textit{effective rank}, has been observed to drastically collapse during the training. In turn, this collapse has been argued to reduce the model's ability to further adapt in later stages of learning, leading to the diminished final performance. Such an association between the effective rank and performance makes effective rank compelling for offline RL, primarily for offline policy evaluation. In this work, we conduct a careful empirical study on the relation between effective rank and performance on three offline RL datasets : bsuite, Atari, and DeepMind lab. We observe that a direct association exists only in restricted settings and disappears in the more extensive hyperparameter sweeps. Also, we empirically identify three phases of learning that explain the impact of implicit regularization on the learning dynamics and found that bootstrapping alone is insufficient to explain the collapse of the effective rank. Further, we show that several other factors could confound the relationship between effective rank and performance and conclude that studying this association under simplistic assumptions could be highly misleading.

Revisiting Gaussian mixture critics in off-policy reinforcement learning: a sample-based approach

Actor-critic algorithms that make use of distributional policy evaluation have frequently been shown to outperform their non-distributional counterparts on many challenging control tasks. Examples of this behavior include the D4PG and DMPO algorithms as compared to DDPG and MPO, respectively [Barth-Maron et al., 2018; Hoffman et al., 2020]. However, both agents rely on the C51 critic for value estimation.One major drawback of the C51 approach is its requirement of prior knowledge about the minimum andmaximum values a policy can attain as well as the number of bins used, which fixes the resolution ofthe distributional estimate. While the DeepMind control suite of tasks utilizes standardized rewards and episode lengths, thus enabling the entire suite to be solved with a single setting of these hyperparameters, this is often not the case. This paper revisits a natural alternative that removes this requirement, namelya mixture of Gaussians, and a simple sample-based loss function to train it in an off-policy regime. We empirically evaluate its performance on a broad range of continuous control tasks and demonstrate that it eliminates the need for these distributional hyperparameters and achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of challenging tasks (e.g. the humanoid, dog, quadruped, and manipulator domains). Finallywe provide an implementation in the Acme agent repository.

RL Unplugged: Benchmarks for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline methods for reinforcement learning have a potential to help bridge the gap between reinforcement learning research and real-world applications. They make it possible to learn policies from offline datasets, thus overcoming concerns associated with online data collection in the real-world, including cost, safety, or ethical concerns. In this paper, we propose a benchmark called RL Unplugged to evaluate and compare offline RL methods. RL Unplugged includes data from a diverse range of domains including games ({\em e.g.,} Atari benchmark) and simulated motor control problems ({\em e.g.,} DM Control Suite). The datasets include domains that are partially or fully observable, use continuous or discrete actions, and have stochastic vs. deterministic dynamics. We propose detailed evaluation protocols for each domain in RL Unplugged and provide an extensive analysis of supervised learning and offline RL methods using these protocols. We will release data for all our tasks and open-source all algorithms presented in this paper. We hope that our suite of benchmarks will increase the reproducibility of experiments and make it possible to study challenging tasks with a limited computational budget, thus making RL research both more systematic and more accessible across the community. Moving forward, we view RL Unplugged as a living benchmark suite that will evolve and grow with datasets contributed by the research community and ourselves. Our project page is available on github (https://git.io/JJUhd).

Acme: A Research Framework for Distributed Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning has led to many recent-and groundbreaking-advancements. However, these advances have often come at the cost of both the scale and complexity of the underlying RL algorithms. Increases in complexity have in turn made it more difficult for researchers to reproduce published RL algorithms or rapidly prototype ideas. To address this, we introduce Acme, a tool to simplify the development of novel RL algorithms that is specifically designed to enable simple agent implementations that can be run at various scales of execution. Our aim is also to make the results of various RL algorithms developed in academia and industrial labs easier to reproduce and extend. To this end we are releasing baseline implementations of various algorithms, created using our framework. In this work we introduce the major design decisions behind Acme and show how these are used to construct these baselines. We also experiment with these agents at different scales of both complexity and computation-including distributed versions. Ultimately, we show that the design decisions behind Acme lead to agents that can be scaled both up and down and that, for the most part, greater levels of parallelization result in agents with equivalent performance, just faster.

Improving the Gating Mechanism of Recurrent Neural Networks

Gating mechanisms are widely used in neural network models, where they allow gradients to backpropagate more easily through depth or time. However, their saturation property introduces problems of its own. For example, in recurrent models these gates need to have outputs near 1 to propagate information over long time-delays, which requires them to operate in their saturation regime and hinders gradient-based learning of the gate mechanism. We address this problem by deriving two synergistic modifications to the standard gating mechanism that are easy to implement, introduce no additional hyperparameters, and improve learnability of the gates when they are close to saturation. We show how these changes are related to and improve on alternative recently proposed gating mechanisms such as chrono-initialization and Ordered Neurons. Empirically, our simple gating mechanisms robustly improve the performance of recurrent models on a range of applications, including synthetic memorization tasks, sequential image classification, language modeling, and reinforcement learning, particularly when long-term dependencies are involved.

Making Efficient Use of Demonstrations to Solve Hard Exploration Problems

This paper introduces R2D3, an agent that makes efficient use of demonstrations to solve hard exploration problems in partially observable environments with highly variable initial conditions. We also introduce a suite of eight tasks that combine these three properties, and show that R2D3 can solve several of the tasks where other state of the art methods (both with and without demonstrations) fail to see even a single successful trajectory after tens of billions of steps of exploration.

TensorFlow Distributions

The TensorFlow Distributions library implements a vision of probability theory adapted to the modern deep-learning paradigm of end-to-end differentiable computation. Building on two basic abstractions, it offers flexible building blocks for probabilistic computation. Distributions provide fast, numerically stable methods for generating samples and computing statistics, e.g., log density. Bijectors provide composable volume-tracking transformations with automatic caching. Together these enable modular construction of high dimensional distributions and transformations not possible with previous libraries (e.g., pixelCNNs, autoregressive flows, and reversible residual networks). They are the workhorse behind deep probabilistic programming systems like Edward and empower fast black-box inference in probabilistic models built on deep-network components. TensorFlow Distributions has proven an important part of the TensorFlow toolkit within Google and in the broader deep learning community.

Celeste: Variational inference for a generative model of astronomical images

We present a new, fully generative model of optical telescope image sets, along with a variational procedure for inference. Each pixel intensity is treated as a Poisson random variable, with a rate parameter dependent on latent properties of stars and galaxies. Key latent properties are themselves random, with scientific prior distributions constructed from large ancillary data sets. We check our approach on synthetic images. We also run it on images from a major sky survey, where it exceeds the performance of the current state-of-the-art method for locating celestial bodies and measuring their colors.

Stochastic Variational Inference

We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models, latent Dirichlet allocation and the hierarchical Dirichlet process topic model. Using stochastic variational inference, we analyze several large collections of documents: 300K articles from Nature, 1.8M articles from The New York Times, and 3.8M articles from Wikipedia. Stochastic inference can easily handle data sets of this size and outperforms traditional variational inference, which can only handle a smaller subset. (We also show that the Bayesian nonparametric topic model outperforms its parametric counterpart.) Stochastic variational inference lets us apply complex Bayesian models to massive data sets.

Sparse Stochastic Inference for Latent Dirichlet allocation

We present a hybrid algorithm for Bayesian topic models that combines the efficiency of sparse Gibbs sampling with the scalability of online stochastic inference. We used our algorithm to analyze a corpus of 1.2 million books (33 billion words) with thousands of topics. Our approach reduces the bias of variational inference and generalizes to many Bayesian hidden-variable models.