Skill-aware Mutual Information Optimisation for Generalisation in Reinforcement Learning

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) agents can struggle to operate across tasks with varying environmental features that require different optimal skills (i.e., different modes of behaviours). Using context encoders based on contrastive learning to enhance the generalisability of Meta-RL agents is now widely studied but faces challenges such as the requirement for a large sample size, also referred to as the $\log$-$K$ curse. To improve RL generalisation to different tasks, we first introduce Skill-aware Mutual Information (SaMI), an optimisation objective that aids in distinguishing context embeddings according to skills, thereby equipping RL agents with the ability to identify and execute different skills across tasks. We then propose Skill-aware Noise Contrastive Estimation (SaNCE), a $K$-sample estimator used to optimise the SaMI objective. We provide a framework for equipping an RL agent with SaNCE in practice and conduct experimental validation on modified MuJoCo and Panda-gym benchmarks. We empirically find that RL agents that learn by maximising SaMI achieve substantially improved zero-shot generalisation to unseen tasks. Additionally, the context encoder equipped with SaNCE demonstrates greater robustness to reductions in the number of available samples, thus possessing the potential to overcome the $\log$-$K$ curse.

Highway Graph to Accelerate Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms often suffer from low training efficiency. A strategy to mitigate this issue is to incorporate a model-based planning algorithm, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) or Value Iteration (VI), into the environmental model. The major limitation of VI is the need to iterate over a large tensor. These still lead to intensive computations. We focus on improving the training efficiency of RL algorithms by improving the efficiency of the value learning process. For the deterministic environments with discrete state and action spaces, a non-branching sequence of transitions moves the agent without deviating from intermediate states, which we call a highway. On such non-branching highways, the value-updating process can be merged as a one-step process instead of iterating the value step-by-step. Based on this observation, we propose a novel graph structure, named highway graph, to model the state transition. Our highway graph compresses the transition model into a concise graph, where edges can represent multiple state transitions to support value propagation across multiple time steps in each iteration. We thus can obtain a more efficient value learning approach by facilitating the VI algorithm on highway graphs. By integrating the highway graph into RL (as a model-based off-policy RL method), the RL training can be remarkably accelerated in the early stages (within 1 million frames). Comparison against various baselines on four categories of environments reveals that our method outperforms both representative and novel model-free and model-based RL algorithms, demonstrating 10 to more than 150 times more efficiency while maintaining an equal or superior expected return, as confirmed by carefully conducted analyses. Moreover, a deep neural network-based agent is trained using the highway graph, resulting in better generalization and lower storage costs.

Multi-view Disentanglement for Reinforcement Learning with Multiple Cameras

The performance of image-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can vary depending on the position of the camera used to capture the images. Training on multiple cameras simultaneously, including a first-person egocentric camera, can leverage information from different camera perspectives to improve the performance of RL. However, hardware constraints may limit the availability of multiple cameras in real-world deployment. Additionally, cameras may become damaged in the real-world preventing access to all cameras that were used during training. To overcome these hardware constraints, we propose Multi-View Disentanglement (MVD), which uses multiple cameras to learn a policy that achieves zero-shot generalisation to any single camera from the training set. Our approach is a self-supervised auxiliary task for RL that learns a disentangled representation from multiple cameras, with a shared representation that is aligned across all cameras to allow generalisation to a single camera, and a private representation that is camera-specific. We show experimentally that an RL agent trained on a single third-person camera is unable to learn an optimal policy in many control tasks; but, our approach, benefiting from multiple cameras during training, is able to solve the task using only the same single third-person camera.

LLM-Personalize: Aligning LLM Planners with Human Preferences via Reinforced Self-Training for Housekeeping Robots

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential for robotics applications, particularly task planning, by harnessing their language comprehension and text generation capabilities. However, in applications such as household robotics, a critical gap remains in the personalization of these models to individual user preferences. We introduce LLM-Personalize, a novel framework with an optimization pipeline designed to personalize LLM planners for household robotics. Our LLM-Personalize framework features an LLM planner that performs iterative planning in multi-room, partially-observable household scenarios, making use of a scene graph constructed with local observations. The generated plan consists of a sequence of high-level actions which are subsequently executed by a controller. Central to our approach is the optimization pipeline, which combines imitation learning and iterative self-training to personalize the LLM planner. In particular, the imitation learning phase performs initial LLM alignment from demonstrations, and bootstraps the model to facilitate effective iterative self-training, which further explores and aligns the model to user preferences. We evaluate LLM-Personalize on Housekeep, a challenging simulated real-world 3D benchmark for household rearrangements, and show that LLM-Personalize achieves more than a 30 percent increase in success rate over existing LLM planners, showcasing significantly improved alignment with human preferences. Project page: https://donggehan.github.io/projectllmpersonalize/.

Explainable AI for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Driving: A Systematic Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) shows promising applications for the perception and planning tasks in autonomous driving (AD) due to its superior performance compared to conventional methods. However, inscrutable AI systems exacerbate the existing challenge of safety assurance of AD. One way to mitigate this challenge is to utilize explainable AI (XAI) techniques. To this end, we present the first comprehensive systematic literature review of explainable methods for safe and trustworthy AD. We begin by analyzing the requirements for AI in the context of AD, focusing on three key aspects: data, model, and agency. We find that XAI is fundamental to meeting these requirements. Based on this, we explain the sources of explanations in AI and describe a taxonomy of XAI. We then identify five key contributions of XAI for safe and trustworthy AI in AD, which are interpretable design, interpretable surrogate models, interpretable monitoring, auxiliary explanations, and interpretable validation. Finally, we propose a modular framework called SafeX to integrate these contributions, enabling explanation delivery to users while simultaneously ensuring the safety of AI models.

ICED: Zero-Shot Transfer in Reinforcement Learning via In-Context Environment Design

Autonomous agents trained using deep reinforcement learning (RL) often lack the ability to successfully generalise to new environments, even when they share characteristics with the environments they have encountered during training. In this work, we investigate how the sampling of individual environment instances, or levels, affects the zero-shot generalisation (ZSG) ability of RL agents. We discover that, for deep actor-critic architectures sharing their base layers, prioritising levels according to their value loss minimises the mutual information between the agent's internal representation and the set of training levels in the generated training data. This provides a novel theoretical justification for the implicit regularisation achieved by certain adaptive sampling strategies. We then turn our attention to unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, which have more control over the data generation mechanism. We find that existing UED methods can significantly shift the training distribution, which translates to low ZSG performance. To prevent both overfitting and distributional shift, we introduce in-context environment design (ICED). ICED generates levels using a variational autoencoder trained over an initial set of level parameters, reducing distributional shift, and achieves significant improvements in ZSG over adaptive level sampling strategies and UED methods.

Sample Relationship from Learning Dynamics Matters for Generalisation

Although much research has been done on proposing new models or loss functions to improve the generalisation of artificial neural networks (ANNs), less attention has been directed to the impact of the training data on generalisation. In this work, we start from approximating the interaction between samples, i.e. how learning one sample would modify the model's prediction on other samples. Through analysing the terms involved in weight updates in supervised learning, we find that labels influence the interaction between samples. Therefore, we propose the labelled pseudo Neural Tangent Kernel (lpNTK) which takes label information into consideration when measuring the interactions between samples. We first prove that lpNTK asymptotically converges to the empirical neural tangent kernel in terms of the Frobenius norm under certain assumptions. Secondly, we illustrate how lpNTK helps to understand learning phenomena identified in previous work, specifically the learning difficulty of samples and forgetting events during learning. Moreover, we also show that using lpNTK to identify and remove poisoning training samples does not hurt the generalisation performance of ANNs.

Is Feedback All You Need? Leveraging Natural Language Feedback in Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Despite numerous successes, the field of reinforcement learning (RL) remains far from matching the impressive generalisation power of human behaviour learning. One possible way to help bridge this gap be to provide RL agents with richer, more human-like feedback expressed in natural language. To investigate this idea, we first extend BabyAI to automatically generate language feedback from the environment dynamics and goal condition success. Then, we modify the Decision Transformer architecture to take advantage of this additional signal. We find that training with language feedback either in place of or in addition to the return-to-go or goal descriptions improves agents' generalisation performance, and that agents can benefit from feedback even when this is only available during training, but not at inference.

Planning to Go Out-of-Distribution in Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning

Offline pretraining with a static dataset followed by online fine-tuning (offline-to-online, or OtO) is a paradigm that is well matched to a real-world RL deployment process: in few real settings would one deploy an offline policy with no test runs and tuning. In this scenario, we aim to find the best-performing policy within a limited budget of online interactions. Previous work in the OtO setting has focused on correcting for bias introduced by the policy-constraint mechanisms of offline RL algorithms. Such constraints keep the learned policy close to the behavior policy that collected the dataset, but this unnecessarily limits policy performance if the behavior policy is far from optimal. Instead, we forgo policy constraints and frame OtO RL as an exploration problem: we must maximize the benefit of the online data-collection. We study major online RL exploration paradigms, adapting them to work well with the OtO setting. These adapted methods contribute several strong baselines. Also, we introduce an algorithm for planning to go out of distribution (PTGOOD), which targets online exploration in relatively high-reward regions of the state-action space unlikely to be visited by the behavior policy. By leveraging concepts from the Conditional Entropy Bottleneck, PTGOOD encourages data collected online to provide new information relevant to improving the final deployment policy. In that way the limited interaction budget is used effectively. We show that PTGOOD significantly improves agent returns during online fine-tuning and finds the optimal policy in as few as 10k online steps in Walker and in as few as 50k in complex control tasks like Humanoid. Also, we find that PTGOOD avoids the suboptimal policy convergence that many of our baselines exhibit in several environments.

How the level sampling process impacts zero-shot generalisation in deep reinforcement learning

A key limitation preventing the wider adoption of autonomous agents trained via deep reinforcement learning (RL) is their limited ability to generalise to new environments, even when these share similar characteristics with environments encountered during training. In this work, we investigate how a non-uniform sampling strategy of individual environment instances, or levels, affects the zero-shot generalisation (ZSG) ability of RL agents, considering two failure modes: overfitting and over-generalisation. As a first step, we measure the mutual information (MI) between the agent's internal representation and the set of training levels, which we find to be well-correlated to instance overfitting. In contrast to uniform sampling, adaptive sampling strategies prioritising levels based on their value loss are more effective at maintaining lower MI, which provides a novel theoretical justification for this class of techniques. We then turn our attention to unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, which adaptively generate new training levels and minimise MI more effectively than methods sampling from a fixed set. However, we find UED methods significantly shift the training distribution, resulting in over-generalisation and worse ZSG performance over the distribution of interest. To prevent both instance overfitting and over-generalisation, we introduce self-supervised environment design (SSED). SSED generates levels using a variational autoencoder, effectively reducing MI while minimising the shift with the distribution of interest, and leads to statistically significant improvements in ZSG over fixed-set level sampling strategies and UED methods.