Preference Learning for Move Prediction and Evaluation Function Approximation in Othello

This paper investigates the use of preference learning as an approach to move prediction and evaluation function approximation, using the game of Othello as a test domain. Using the same sets of features, we compare our approach with least squares temporal difference learning, direct classification, and with the Bradley-Terry model, fitted using minorization-maximization (MM). The results show that the exact way in which preference learning is applied is critical to achieving high performance. Best results were obtained using a combination of board inversion and pair-wise preference learning. This combination significantly outperformed the others under test, both in terms of move prediction accuracy, and in the level of play achieved when using the learned evaluation function as a move selector during game play

Random Expert Distillation: Imitation Learning via Expert Policy Support Estimation

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed by reinforcement learning is indirect and may be computationally expensive. Recent generative adversarial methods based on matching the policy distribution between the expert and the agent could be unstable during training. We propose a new framework for imitation learning by estimating the support of the expert policy to compute a fixed reward function, which allows us to re-frame imitation learning within the standard reinforcement learning setting. We demonstrate the efficacy of our reward function on both discrete and continuous domains, achieving comparable or better performance than the state of the art under different reinforcement learning algorithms

State-based Policy Representation for Deep Policy Learning

Reinforcement Learning has achieved noticeable success in many fields, such as video game playing, continuous control, and the game of Go. One the other hand, current approaches usually require large sample complexity, and also lack the transferability to similar tasks. Imitation learning, also known as ``learning from demonstrations'', is possible to mitigate the former problem by providing successful experiences. However, current methods usually assume the expert and imitator are the same, which lack flexibility and robustness when the dynamics change.Generalizability is the core of artificial intelligence. An agent should be able to apply its knowledge for novel tasks after training in similar environments, or providing related demonstrations. Given current observation, it should have the ability to predict what can happen (modeling), and what needs to happen (planning). This brings out challenges on how to represent the knowledge and how to utilize the knowledge by learning from interactions or demonstrations.In this thesis, we will systematically study two important problems, the universal goal-reaching problem and the cross-morphology imitation learning problem, which are representative challenges in the field of reinforcement learning and imitation learning. Laying out our research work that attends to these challenging tasks unfolds our roadmap towards the holy-grail goal: make the agent generalizable by learning from observations and model the world

Coherent Soft Imitation Learning

Imitation learning methods seek to learn from an expert either through behavioral cloning (BC) of the policy or inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) of the reward. Such methods enable agents to learn complex tasks from humans that are difficult to capture with hand-designed reward functions. Choosing BC or IRL for imitation depends on the quality and state-action coverage of the demonstrations, as well as additional access to the Markov decision process. Hybrid strategies that combine BC and IRL are not common, as initial policy optimization against inaccurate rewards diminishes the benefit of pretraining the policy with BC. This work derives an imitation method that captures the strengths of both BC and IRL. In the entropy-regularized ('soft') reinforcement learning setting, we show that the behaviour-cloned policy can be used as both a shaped reward and a critic hypothesis space by inverting the regularized policy update. This coherency facilities fine-tuning cloned policies using the reward estimate and additional interactions with the environment. This approach conveniently achieves imitation learning through initial behaviour cloning, followed by refinement via RL with online or offline data sources. The simplicity of the approach enables graceful scaling to high-dimensional and vision-based tasks, with stable learning and minimal hyperparameter tuning, in contrast to adversarial approaches.Comment: 51 pages, 47 figures. DeepMind internship repor

Towards Informed Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this thesis, we discuss various techniques for improving exploration for deep reinforcement learning. We begin with a brief review of reinforcement learning (RL) and the fundamental v.s. exploitation trade-off. Then we review how deep RL has improved upon classical and summarize six categories of the latest exploration methods for deep RL, in the order increasing usage of prior information. We then explore representative works in three categories discuss their strengths and weaknesses. The first category, represented by Soft Q-learning, uses regularization to encourage exploration. The second category, represented by count-based via hashing, maps states to hash codes for counting and assigns higher exploration to less-encountered states. The third category utilizes hierarchy and is represented by modular architecture for RL agents to play StarCraft II. Finally, we conclude that exploration by prior knowledge is a promising research direction and suggest topics of potentially impact

Reinforcement learning with value advice

The problem we consider in this paper is reinforcement learning with value advice. In this setting, the agent is given limited access to an oracle that can tell it the expected return (value) of any state-action pair with respect to the optimal policy. The agent must use this value to learn an explicit policy that performs well in the environment. We provide an algorithm called RLAdvice, based on the imitation learning algorithm DAgger. We illustrate the effectiveness of this method in the Arcade Learning Environment on three different games, using value estimates from UCT as advice

Expert iteration

In this thesis, we study how reinforcement learning algorithms can tackle classical board games without recourse to human knowledge. Specifically, we develop a framework and algorithms which learn to play the board game Hex starting from random play. We first describe Expert Iteration (ExIt), a novel reinforcement learning framework which extends Modified Policy Iteration. ExIt explicitly decomposes the reinforcement learning problem into two parts: planning and generalisation. A planning algorithm explores possible move sequences starting from a particular position to find good strategies from that position, while a parametric function approximator is trained to predict those plans, generalising to states not yet seen. Subsequently, planning is improved by using the approximated policy to guide search, increasing the strength of new plans. This decomposition allows ExIt to combine the benefits of both planning methods and function approximation methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the ExIt paradigm by implementing ExIt with two different planning algorithms. First, we develop a version based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), a search algorithm which has been successful both in specific games, such as Go, Hex and Havannah, and in general game playing competitions. We then develop a new planning algorithm, Policy Gradient Search (PGS), which uses a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm for online planning. Unlike MCTS, PGS does not require an explicit search tree. Instead PGS uses function approximation within a single search, allowing it to be applied to problems with larger branching factors. Both MCTS-ExIt and PGS-ExIt defeated MoHex 2.0 - the most recent Hex Olympiad winner to be open sourced - in 9 × 9 Hex. More importantly, whereas MoHex makes use of many Hex-specific improvements and knowledge, all our programs were trained tabula rasa using general reinforcement learning methods. This bodes well for ExIt’s applicability to both other games and real world decision making problems