KL-regularized reinforcement learning from expert demonstrations has proved successful in improving the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, allowing them to be applied to challenging physical real-world tasks. However, we show that KL-regularized reinforcement learning with behavioral reference policies derived from expert demonstrations can suffer from pathological training dynamics that can lead to slow, unstable, and suboptimal online learning. We show empirically that the pathology occurs for commonly chosen behavioral policy classes and demonstrate its impact on sample efficiency and online policy performance. Finally, we show that the pathology can be remedied by non-parametric behavioral reference policies and that this allows KL-regularized reinforcement learning to significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches on a variety of challenging locomotion and dexterous hand manipulation tasks.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the problem of learning policies entirely from a large batch of previously collected data. This problem setting offers the promise of utilizing such datasets to acquire policies without any costly or dangerous active exploration. However, it is also challenging, due to the distributional shift between the offline training data and those states visited by the learned policy. Despite significant recent progress, the most successful prior methods are model-free and constrain the policy to the support of data, precluding generalization to unseen states. In this paper, we first observe that an existing model-based RL algorithm already produces significant gains in the offline setting compared to model-free approaches. However, standard model-based RL methods, designed for the online setting, do not provide an explicit mechanism to avoid the offline setting's distributional shift issue. Instead, we propose to modify the existing model-based RL methods by applying them with rewards artificially penalized by the uncertainty of the dynamics. We theoretically show that the algorithm maximizes a lower bound of the policy's return under the true MDP. We also characterize the trade-off between the gain and risk of leaving the support of the batch data. Our algorithm, Model-based Offline Policy Optimization (MOPO), outperforms standard model-based RL algorithms and prior state-of-the-art model-free offline RL algorithms on existing offline RL benchmarks and two challenging continuous control tasks that require generalizing from data collected for a different task. * equal contribution. † equal advising. Orders randomized.34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020),

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and brittle convergence properties, which necessitate meticulous hyperparameter tuning. Both of these challenges severely limit the applicability of such methods to complex, real-world domains. In this paper, we propose soft actor-critic, an offpolicy actor-critic deep RL algorithm based on the maximum entropy reinforcement learning framework. In this framework, the actor aims to maximize expected reward while also maximizing entropy. That is, to succeed at the task while acting as randomly as possible. Prior deep RL methods based on this framework have been formulated as Q-learning methods. By combining off-policy updates with a stable stochastic actor-critic formulation, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of continuous control benchmark tasks, outperforming prior on-policy and off-policy methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, in contrast to other off-policy algorithms, our approach is very stable, achieving very similar performance across different random seeds.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a new way to generate robot control policy. However, the process of training control policy requires lengthy exploration, resulting in a low sample efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world tasks. Both imitation learning (IL) and learning from demonstrations (LfD) improve the training process by using expert demonstrations, but imperfect expert demonstrations can mislead policy improvement. Offline to Online reinforcement learning requires a lot of offline data to initialize the policy, and distribution shift can easily lead to performance degradation during online fine-tuning. To solve the above problems, we propose a learning from demonstrations method named A-SILfD, which treats expert demonstrations as the agent's successful experiences and uses experiences to constrain policy improvement. Furthermore, we prevent performance degradation due to large estimation errors in the Q-function by the ensemble Q-functions. Our experiments show that A-SILfD can significantly improve sample efficiency using a small number of different quality expert demonstrations. In four Mujoco continuous control tasks, A-SILfD can significantly outperform baseline methods after 150,000 steps of online training and is not misled by imperfect expert demonstrations during training.

Many practical applications of reinforcement learning constrain agents to learn from a fixed batch of data which has already been gathered, without offering further possibility for data collection. In this paper, we demonstrate that due to errors introduced by extrapolation, standard offpolicy deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as DQN and DDPG, are incapable of learning without data correlated to the distribution under the current policy, making them ineffective for this fixed batch setting. We introduce a novel class of off-policy algorithms, batch-constrained reinforcement learning, which restricts the action space in order to force the agent towards behaving close to on-policy with respect to a subset of the given data. We present the first continuous control deep reinforcement learning algorithm which can learn effectively from arbitrary, fixed batch data, and empirically demonstrate the quality of its behavior in several tasks.

Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without further interaction. However, in practice, offline RL presents a major challenge, and standard off-policy RL methods can fail due to overestimation of values induced by the distributional shift between the dataset and the learned policy, especially when training on complex and multi-modal data distributions. In this paper, we propose conservative Q-learning (CQL), which aims to address these limitations by learning a conservative Q-function such that the expected value of a policy under this Q-function lower-bounds its true value. We theoretically show that CQL produces a lower bound on the value of the current policy and that it can be incorporated into a policy learning procedure with theoretical improvement guarantees. In practice, CQL augments the standard Bellman error objective with a simple Q-value regularizer which is straightforward to implement on top of existing deep Q-learning and actor-critic implementations. On both discrete and continuous control domains, we show that CQL substantially outperforms existing offline RL methods, often learning policies that attain 2-5 times higher final return, especially when learning from complex and multi-modal data distributions.Preprint. Under review.

离线强化学习在利用大型预采用的数据集进行政策学习方面表现出了巨大的希望，使代理商可以放弃经常廉价的在线数据收集。但是，迄今为止，离线强化学习的探索相对较小，并且缺乏对剩余挑战所在的何处的了解。在本文中，我们试图建立简单的基线以在视觉域中连续控制。我们表明，对两个基于最先进的在线增强学习算法，Dreamerv2和DRQ-V2进行了简单的修改，足以超越事先工作并建立竞争性的基准。我们在现有的离线数据集中对这些算法进行了严格的评估，以及从视觉观察结果中进行离线强化学习的新测试台，更好地代表现实世界中离线增强学习问题中存在的数据分布，并开放我们的代码和数据以促进此方面的进度重要领域。最后，我们介绍并分析了来自视觉观察的离线RL所独有的几个关键Desiderata，包括视觉分散注意力和动态视觉上可识别的变化。

有效的探索是深度强化学习的关键挑战。几种方法，例如行为先验，能够利用离线数据，以便在复杂任务上有效加速加强学习。但是，如果手动的任务与所证明的任务过度偏离，则此类方法的有效性是有限的。在我们的工作中，我们建议从离线数据中学习功能，这些功能由更加多样化的任务共享，例如动作与定向之间的相关性。因此，我们介绍了无国有先验，该先验直接在显示的轨迹中直接建模时间一致性，并且即使在对简单任务收集的数据进行培训时，也能够在复杂的任务中推动探索。此外，我们通过从政策和行动之前的概率混合物中动态采样动作，引入了一种新颖的集成方案，用于非政策强化学习中的动作研究。我们将我们的方法与强大的基线相提并论，并提供了经验证据，表明它可以在稀疏奖励环境下的长途持续控制任务中加速加强学习。

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the task, but also provide sufficient shaping to accomplish it. In this paper, we view reinforcement learning as inferring policies that achieve desired outcomes, rather than as a problem of maximizing rewards. To solve this inference problem, we establish a novel variational inference formulation that allows us to derive a well-shaped reward function which can be learned directly from environment interactions. From the corresponding variational objective, we also derive a new probabilistic Bellman backup operator and use it to develop an off-policy algorithm to solve goal-directed tasks. We empirically demonstrate that this method eliminates the need to hand-craft reward functions for a suite of diverse manipulation and locomotion tasks and leads to effective goal-directed behaviors.

Off-policy reinforcement learning aims to leverage experience collected from prior policies for sample-efficient learning. However, in practice, commonly used off-policy approximate dynamic programming methods based on Q-learning and actor-critic methods are highly sensitive to the data distribution, and can make only limited progress without collecting additional on-policy data. As a step towards more robust off-policy algorithms, we study the setting where the off-policy experience is fixed and there is no further interaction with the environment. We identify bootstrapping error as a key source of instability in current methods. Bootstrapping error is due to bootstrapping from actions that lie outside of the training data distribution, and it accumulates via the Bellman backup operator. We theoretically analyze bootstrapping error, and demonstrate how carefully constraining action selection in the backup can mitigate it. Based on our analysis, we propose a practical algorithm, bootstrapping error accumulation reduction (BEAR). We demonstrate that BEAR is able to learn robustly from different off-policy distributions, including random and suboptimal demonstrations, on a range of continuous control tasks.

与政策策略梯度技术相比，使用先前收集的数据的无模型的无模型深钢筋学习（RL）方法可以提高采样效率。但是，当利益政策的分布与收集数据的政策之间的差异时，非政策学习变得具有挑战性。尽管提出了良好的重要性抽样和范围的政策梯度技术来补偿这种差异，但它们通常需要一系列长轨迹，以增加计算复杂性并引起其他问题，例如消失或爆炸梯度。此外，由于需要行动概率，它们对连续动作领域的概括严格受到限制，这不适合确定性政策。为了克服这些局限性，我们引入了一种替代的非上政策校正算法，用于连续作用空间，参与者 - 批判性非政策校正（AC-OFF-POC），以减轻先前收集的数据引入的潜在缺陷。通过由代理商对随机采样批次过渡的状态的最新动作决策计算出的新颖差异度量，该方法不需要任何策略的实际或估计的行动概率，并提供足够的一步重要性抽样。理论结果表明，引入的方法可以使用固定的独特点获得收缩映射，从而可以进行“安全”的非政策学习。我们的经验结果表明，AC-Off-POC始终通过有效地安排学习率和Q学习和政策优化的学习率，以比竞争方法更少的步骤改善最新的回报。

在现实世界中学习机器人任务仍然是高度挑战性的，有效的实用解决方案仍有待发现。在该领域使用的传统方法是模仿学习和强化学习，但是当应用于真正的机器人时，它们都有局限性。将强化学习与预先收集的演示结合在一起是一种有前途的方法，可以帮助学习控制机器人任务的控制政策。在本文中，我们提出了一种使用新技术来利用离线和在线培训来利用离线专家数据的算法，以获得更快的收敛性和提高性能。拟议的算法（AWET）用新颖的代理优势权重对批评损失进行了加权，以改善专家数据。此外，AWET利用自动的早期终止技术来停止和丢弃与专家轨迹不同的策略推出 - 以防止脱离专家数据。在一项消融研究中，与在四个标准机器人任务上的最新基线相比，AWET表现出改善和有希望的表现。

深度强化学习（RL）导致了许多最近和开创性的进步。但是，这些进步通常以培训的基础体系结构的规模增加以及用于训练它们的RL算法的复杂性提高，而均以增加规模的成本。这些增长反过来又使研究人员更难迅速原型新想法或复制已发表的RL算法。为了解决这些问题，这项工作描述了ACME，这是一个用于构建新型RL算法的框架，这些框架是专门设计的，用于启用使用简单的模块化组件构建的代理，这些组件可以在各种执行范围内使用。尽管ACME的主要目标是为算法开发提供一个框架，但第二个目标是提供重要或最先进算法的简单参考实现。这些实现既是对我们的设计决策的验证，也是对RL研究中可重复性的重要贡献。在这项工作中，我们描述了ACME内部做出的主要设计决策，并提供了有关如何使用其组件来实施各种算法的进一步详细信息。我们的实验为许多常见和最先进的算法提供了基准，并显示了如何为更大且更复杂的环境扩展这些算法。这突出了ACME的主要优点之一，即它可用于实现大型，分布式的RL算法，这些算法可以以较大的尺度运行，同时仍保持该实现的固有可读性。这项工作提出了第二篇文章的版本，恰好与模块化的增加相吻合，对离线，模仿和从演示算法学习以及作为ACME的一部分实现的各种新代理。

依赖于太多的实验来学习良好的行动，目前的强化学习（RL）算法在现实世界的环境中具有有限的适用性，这可能太昂贵，无法探索探索。我们提出了一种批量RL算法，其中仅使用固定的脱机数据集来学习有效策略，而不是与环境的在线交互。批量RL中的有限数据产生了在培训数据中不充分表示的状态/行动的价值估计中的固有不确定性。当我们的候选政策从生成数据的候选政策发散时，这导致特别严重的外推。我们建议通过两个直接的惩罚来减轻这个问题：减少这种分歧的政策限制和减少过于乐观估计的价值约束。在全面的32个连续动作批量RL基准测试中，我们的方法对最先进的方法进行了比较，无论如何收集离线数据如何。

离线增强学习（RL）将经典RL算法的范式扩展到纯粹从静态数据集中学习，而无需在学习过程中与基础环境进行交互。离线RL的一个关键挑战是政策培训的不稳定，这是由于离线数据的分布与学习政策的未结束的固定状态分配之间的不匹配引起的。为了避免分配不匹配的有害影响，我们将当前政策的未静置固定分配正规化在政策优化过程中的离线数据。此外，我们训练动力学模型既实施此正规化，又可以更好地估计当前策略的固定分布，从而减少了分布不匹配引起的错误。在各种连续控制的离线RL数据集中，我们的方法表示竞争性能，从而验证了我们的算法。该代码公开可用。

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have succeeded in several challenging domains. Classic Online RL job schedulers can learn efficient scheduling strategies but often takes thousands of timesteps to explore the environment and adapt from a randomly initialized DNN policy. Existing RL schedulers overlook the importance of learning from historical data and improving upon custom heuristic policies. Offline reinforcement learning presents the prospect of policy optimization from pre-recorded datasets without online environment interaction. Following the recent success of data-driven learning, we explore two RL methods: 1) Behaviour Cloning and 2) Offline RL, which aim to learn policies from logged data without interacting with the environment. These methods address the challenges concerning the cost of data collection and safety, particularly pertinent to real-world applications of RL. Although the data-driven RL methods generate good results, we show that the performance is highly dependent on the quality of the historical datasets. Finally, we demonstrate that by effectively incorporating prior expert demonstrations to pre-train the agent, we short-circuit the random exploration phase to learn a reasonable policy with online training. We utilize Offline RL as a \textbf{launchpad} to learn effective scheduling policies from prior experience collected using Oracle or heuristic policies. Such a framework is effective for pre-training from historical datasets and well suited to continuous improvement with online data collection.

如何在演示相对较大时更加普遍地进行模仿学习一直是强化学习（RL）的持续存在问题。糟糕的示威活动导致狭窄和偏见的日期分布，非马洛维亚人类专家演示使代理商难以学习，而过度依赖子最优轨迹可以使代理商努力提高其性能。为了解决这些问题，我们提出了一种名为TD3FG的新算法，可以平稳地过渡从专家到学习从经验中学习。我们的算法在Mujoco环境中实现了有限的有限和次优的演示。我们使用行为克隆来将网络作为参考动作发生器训练，并在丢失函数和勘探噪声方面使用它。这种创新可以帮助代理商从示威活动中提取先验知识，同时降低了糟糕的马尔科维亚特性的公正的不利影响。与BC +微调和DDPGFD方法相比，它具有更好的性能，特别是当示范相对有限时。我们调用我们的方法TD3FG意味着来自发电机的TD3。

仿制学习（IL）是一个框架，了解从示范中模仿专家行为。最近，IL显示了高维和控制任务的有希望的结果。然而，IL通常遭受环境互动方面的样本低效率，这严重限制了它们对模拟域的应用。在工业应用中，学习者通常具有高的相互作用成本，与环境的互动越多，对环境的损害越多，学习者本身就越多。在本文中，我们努力通过引入逆钢筋学习的新颖方案来提高样本效率。我们的方法，我们调用\ texit {model redion函数基础的模仿学习}（mrfil），使用一个集合动态模型作为奖励功能，是通过专家演示培训的内容。关键的想法是通过在符合专家示范分布时提供积极奖励，为代理商提供与漫长地平线相匹配的演示。此外，我们展示了新客观函数的收敛保证。实验结果表明，与IL方法相比，我们的算法达到了竞争性能，并显着降低了环境交互。

需要大量人类努力和迭代的奖励功能规范仍然是通过深入的强化学习来学习行为的主要障碍。相比之下，提供所需行为的视觉演示通常会提供一种更简单，更自然的教师的方式。我们考虑为代理提供了一个固定的视觉演示数据集，说明了如何执行任务，并且必须学习使用提供的演示和无监督的环境交互来解决任务。此设置提出了许多挑战，包括对视觉观察的表示，由于缺乏固定的奖励或学习信号而导致的，由于高维空间而引起的样本复杂性以及学习不稳定。为了解决这些挑战，我们开发了一种基于变异模型的对抗模仿学习（V-Mail）算法。基于模型的方法为表示学习，实现样本效率并通过实现派利学习来提高对抗性训练的稳定性提供了强烈的信号。通过涉及几种基于视觉的运动和操纵任务的实验，我们发现V-Mail以样本有效的方式学习了成功的视觉运动策略，与先前的工作相比，稳定性更高，并且还可以实现较高的渐近性能。我们进一步发现，通过传输学习模型，V-Mail可以从视觉演示中学习新任务，而无需任何其他环境交互。所有结果在内的所有结果都可以在\ url {https://sites.google.com/view/variational-mail}在线找到。

在许多顺序决策问题（例如，机器人控制，游戏播放，顺序预测），人类或专家数据可用包含有关任务的有用信息。然而，来自少量专家数据的模仿学习（IL）可能在具有复杂动态的高维环境中具有挑战性。行为克隆是一种简单的方法，由于其简单的实现和稳定的收敛而被广泛使用，但不利用涉及环境动态的任何信息。由于对奖励和政策近似器或偏差，高方差梯度估计器，难以在实践中难以在实践中努力训练的许多现有方法。我们介绍了一种用于动态感知IL的方法，它通过学习单个Q函数来避免对抗训练，隐含地代表奖励和策略。在标准基准测试中，隐式学习的奖励显示与地面真实奖励的高正面相关性，说明我们的方法也可以用于逆钢筋学习（IRL）。我们的方法，逆软Q学习（IQ-Learn）获得了最先进的结果，在离线和在线模仿学习设置中，显着优于现有的现有方法，这些方法都在所需的环境交互和高维空间中的可扩展性中，通常超过3倍。