Learning a good representation is a crucial challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Self-predictive algorithms jointly learn a latent representation and dynamics model by bootstrapping from future latent representations (BYOL). Recent work has developed theoretical insights into these algorithms by studying a continuous-time ODE model in the case of a fixed policy (BYOL-$\Pi$); this assumption is at odds with practical implementations, which explicitly condition their predictions on future actions. In this work, we take a step towards bridging the gap between theory and practice by analyzing an action-conditional self-predictive objective (BYOL-AC) using the ODE framework. Interestingly, we uncover that BYOL-$\Pi$ and BYOL-AC are related through the lens of variance. We unify the study of these objectives through two complementary lenses; a model-based perspective, where each objective is related to low-rank approximation of certain dynamics, and a model-free perspective, which relates the objectives to modified value, Q-value, and Advantage functions. This mismatch with the true value functions leads to the empirical observation (in both linear and deep RL experiments) that BYOL-$\Pi$ and BYOL-AC are either very similar in performance across many tasks or task-dependent.

Agents are minimally entities that are influenced by their past observations and act to influence future observations. This latter capacity is captured by empowerment, which has served as a vital framing concept across artificial intelligence and cognitive science. This former capacity, however, is equally foundational: In what ways, and to what extent, can an agent be influenced by what it observes? In this paper, we ground this concept in a universal agent-centric measure that we refer to as plasticity, and reveal a fundamental connection to empowerment. Following a set of desiderata on a suitable definition, we define plasticity using a new information-theoretic quantity we call the generalized directed information. We show that this new quantity strictly generalizes the directed information introduced by Massey (1990) while preserving all of its desirable properties. Under this definition, we find that plasticity is well thought of as the mirror of empowerment: The two concepts are defined using the same measure, with only the direction of influence reversed. Our main result establishes a tension between the plasticity and empowerment of an agent, suggesting that agent design needs to be mindful of both characteristics. We explore the implications of these findings, and suggest that plasticity, empowerment, and their relationship are essential to understanding agency.

We introduce distributional dynamic programming (DP) methods for optimizing statistical functionals of the return distribution, with standard reinforcement learning as a special case. Previous distributional DP methods could optimize the same class of expected utilities as classic DP. To go beyond, we combine distributional DP with stock augmentation, a technique previously introduced for classic DP in the context of risk-sensitive RL, where the MDP state is augmented with a statistic of the rewards obtained since the first time step. We find that a number of recently studied problems can be formulated as stock-augmented return distribution optimization, and we show that we can use distributional DP to solve them. We analyze distributional value and policy iteration, with bounds and a study of what objectives these distributional DP methods can or cannot optimize. We describe a number of applications outlining how to use distributional DP to solve different stock-augmented return distribution optimization problems, for example maximizing conditional value-at-risk, and homeostatic regulation. To highlight the practical potential of stock-augmented return distribution optimization and distributional DP, we introduce an agent that combines DQN and the core ideas of distributional DP, and empirically evaluate it for solving instances of the applications discussed.

Normalization layers have recently experienced a renaissance in the deep reinforcement learning and continual learning literature, with several works highlighting diverse benefits such as improving loss landscape conditioning and combatting overestimation bias. However, normalization brings with it a subtle but important side effect: an equivalence between growth in the norm of the network parameters and decay in the effective learning rate. This becomes problematic in continual learning settings, where the resulting learning rate schedule may decay to near zero too quickly relative to the timescale of the learning problem. We propose to make the learning rate schedule explicit with a simple re-parameterization which we call Normalize-and-Project (NaP), which couples the insertion of normalization layers with weight projection, ensuring that the effective learning rate remains constant throughout training. This technique reveals itself as a powerful analytical tool to better understand learning rate schedules in deep reinforcement learning, and as a means of improving robustness to nonstationarity in synthetic plasticity loss benchmarks along with both the single-task and sequential variants of the Arcade Learning Environment. We also show that our approach can be easily applied to popular architectures such as ResNets and transformers while recovering and in some cases even slightly improving the performance of the base model in common stationary benchmarks.

Due to the recent remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, researchers have begun to consider challenging learning problems such as learning to generalize behavior from large offline datasets or learning online in non-Markovian environments. Meanwhile, recent advances in both of these areas have increasingly relied on conditioning policies on large context lengths. A natural question is if there is a limit to the performance benefits of increasing the context length if the computation needed is available. In this work, we establish a novel theoretical result that links the context length of a policy to the time needed to reliably evaluate its performance (i.e., its mixing time) in large scale partially observable reinforcement learning environments that exhibit latent sub-task structure. This analysis underscores a key tradeoff: when we extend the context length, our policy can more effectively model non-Markovian dependencies, but this comes at the cost of potentially slower policy evaluation and as a result slower downstream learning. Moreover, our empirical results highlight the relevance of this analysis when leveraging Transformer based neural networks. This perspective will become increasingly pertinent as the field scales towards larger and more realistic environments, opening up a number of potential future directions for improving the way we design learning agents.

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown significant progress in extracting useful representations from high-dimensional inputs albeit using hand-crafted auxiliary tasks and pseudo rewards. Automatically learning such representations in an object-centric manner geared towards control and fast adaptation remains an open research problem. In this paper, we introduce a method that tries to discover meaningful features from objects, translating them to temporally coherent `question' functions and leveraging the subsequent learned general value functions for control. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art techniques alongside other ablations and show competitive performance in both stationary and non-stationary settings. Finally, we also investigate the discovered general value functions and through qualitative analysis show that the learned representations are not only interpretable but also, centered around objects that are invariant to changes across tasks facilitating fast adaptation.

In this article, we aim to provide a literature review of different formulations and approaches to continual reinforcement learning (RL), also known as lifelong or non-stationary RL. We begin by discussing our perspective on why RL is a natural fit for studying continual learning. We then provide a taxonomy of different continual RL formulations by mathematically characterizing two key properties of non-stationarity, namely, the scope and driver non-stationarity. This offers a unified view of various formulations. Next, we review and present a taxonomy of continual RL approaches. We go on to discuss evaluation of continual RL agents, providing an overview of benchmarks used in the literature and important metrics for understanding agent performance. Finally, we highlight open problems and challenges in bridging the gap between the current state of continual RL and findings in neuroscience. While still in its early days, the study of continual RL has the promise to develop better incremental reinforcement learners that can function in increasingly realistic applications where non-stationarity plays a vital role. These include applications such as those in the fields of healthcare, education, logistics, and robotics.

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically geared towards optimizing the expected return of an agent. However, in many practical applications, low variance in the return is desired to ensure the reliability of an algorithm. In this paper, we propose on-policy and off-policy actor-critic algorithms that optimize a performance criterion involving both mean and variance in the return. Previous work uses the second moment of return to estimate the variance indirectly. Instead, we use a much simpler recently proposed direct variance estimator which updates the estimates incrementally using temporal difference methods. Using the variance-penalized criterion, we guarantee the convergence of our algorithm to locally optimal policies for finite state action Markov decision processes. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithm in tabular and continuous MuJoCo domains. Our approach not only performs on par with actor-critic and prior variance-penalization baselines in terms of expected return, but also generates trajectories which have lower variance in the return.

Visual saliency has emerged as a major visualization tool for interpreting deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents. However, much of the existing research uses it as an analyzing tool rather than an inductive bias for policy learning. In this work, we use visual attention as an inductive bias for RL agents. We propose a novel self-supervised attention learning approach which can 1. learn to select regions of interest without explicit annotations, and 2. act as a plug for existing deep RL methods to improve the learning performance. We empirically show that the self-supervised attention-aware deep RL methods outperform the baselines in the context of both the rate of convergence and performance. Furthermore, the proposed self-supervised attention is not tied with specific policies, nor restricted to a specific scene. We posit that the proposed approach is a general self-supervised attention module for multi-task learning and transfer learning, and empirically validate the generalization ability of the proposed method. Finally, we show that our method learns meaningful object keypoints highlighting improvements both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Humans and animals have the ability to reason and make predictions about different courses of action at many time scales. In reinforcement learning, option models (Sutton, Precup & Singh, 1999; Precup, 2000) provide the framework for this kind of temporally abstract prediction and reasoning. Natural intelligent agents are also able to focus their attention on courses of action that are relevant or feasible in a given situation, sometimes termed affordable actions. In this paper, we define a notion of affordances for options, and develop temporally abstract partial option models, that take into account the fact that an option might be affordable only in certain situations. We analyze the trade-offs between estimation and approximation error in planning and learning when using such models, and identify some interesting special cases. Additionally, we empirically demonstrate the ability to learn both affordances and partial option models online resulting in improved sample efficiency and planning time in the Taxi domain.

Temporal abstraction refers to the ability of an agent to use behaviours of controllers which act for a limited, variable amount of time. The options framework describes such behaviours as consisting of a subset of states in which they can initiate, an internal policy and a stochastic termination condition. However, much of the subsequent work on option discovery has ignored the initiation set, because of difficulty in learning it from data. We provide a generalization of initiation sets suitable for general function approximation, by defining an interest function associated with an option. We derive a gradient-based learning algorithm for interest functions, leading to a new interest-option-critic architecture. We investigate how interest functions can be leveraged to learn interpretable and reusable temporal abstractions. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach through quantitative and qualitative results, in both discrete and continuous environments.

Abstraction can improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning. However, the process of abstraction inherently discards information, potentially compromising an agent’s ability to represent high-value policies. To mitigate this, we here introduce combinations of state abstractions and options that are guaranteed to preserve representation of near-optimal policies. We first define $\phi$-relative options, a general formalism for analyzing the value loss of options paired with a state abstraction, and present necessary and sufficient conditions for $\phi$-relative options to preserve near-optimal behavior in any finite Markov Decision Process. We further show that, under appropriate assumptions, $\phi$-relative options can be composed to induce hierarchical abstractions that are also guaranteed to represent high-value policies.

Reinforcement learning algorithms usually assume that all actions are always available to an agent. However, both people and animals understand the general link between the features of their environment and the actions that are feasible. Gibson (1977) coined the term "affordances" to describe the fact that certain states enable an agent to do certain actions, in the context of embodied agents. In this paper, we develop a theory of affordances for agents who learn and plan in Markov Decision Processes. Affordances play a dual role in this case. On one hand, they allow faster planning, by reducing the number of actions available in any given situation. On the other hand, they facilitate more efficient and precise learning of transition models from data, especially when such models require function approximation. We establish these properties through theoretical results as well as illustrative examples. We also propose an approach to learn affordances and use it to estimate transition models that are simpler and generalize better.

Learning temporal abstractions which are partial solutions to a task and could be reused for solving other tasks is an ingredient that can help agents to plan and learn efficiently. In this work, we tackle this problem in the options framework. We aim to autonomously learn options which are specialized in different state space regions by proposing a notion of interest functions, which generalizes initiation sets from the options framework for function approximation. We build on the option-critic framework to derive policy gradient theorems for interest functions, leading to a new interest-option-critic architecture.

Traditional comics are increasingly being augmented with digital effects, such as recoloring, stereoscopy, and animation. An open question in this endeavor is identifying where in a comic panel the effects should be placed. We propose a fast, semi-automatic technique to identify effects-worthy segments in a comic panel by utilizing gaze locations as a proxy for the importance of a region. We take advantage of the fact that comic artists influence viewer gaze towards narrative important regions. By capturing gaze locations from multiple viewers, we can identify important regions and direct a computer vision segmentation algorithm to extract these segments. The challenge is that these gaze data are noisy and difficult to process. Our key contribution is to leverage a theoretical breakthrough in the computer networks community towards robust and meaningful clustering of gaze locations into semantic regions, without needing the user to specify the number of clusters. We present a method based on the concept of relative eigen quality that takes a scanned comic image and a set of gaze points and produces an image segmentation. We demonstrate a variety of effects such as defocus, recoloring, stereoscopy, and animations. We also investigate the use of artificially generated gaze locations from saliency models in place of actual gaze locations.