Introducing Symmetries to Black Box Meta Reinforcement Learning

Bibliographic Details
Title: Introducing Symmetries to Black Box Meta Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Kirsch, Louis, Flennerhag, Sebastian, van Hasselt, Hado, Friesen, Abram, Oh, Junhyuk, Chen, Yutian
Publication Year: 2021
Collection: Computer Science
Statistics
Subject Terms: Computer Science - Machine Learning, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science - Neural and Evolutionary Computing, Statistics - Machine Learning
More Details: Meta reinforcement learning (RL) attempts to discover new RL algorithms automatically from environment interaction. In so-called black-box approaches, the policy and the learning algorithm are jointly represented by a single neural network. These methods are very flexible, but they tend to underperform in terms of generalisation to new, unseen environments. In this paper, we explore the role of symmetries in meta-generalisation. We show that a recent successful meta RL approach that meta-learns an objective for backpropagation-based learning exhibits certain symmetries (specifically the reuse of the learning rule, and invariance to input and output permutations) that are not present in typical black-box meta RL systems. We hypothesise that these symmetries can play an important role in meta-generalisation. Building off recent work in black-box supervised meta learning, we develop a black-box meta RL system that exhibits these same symmetries. We show through careful experimentation that incorporating these symmetries can lead to algorithms with a greater ability to generalise to unseen action & observation spaces, tasks, and environments.
Comment: AAAI 2022
Document Type: Working Paper
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10781
Accession Number: edsarx.2109.10781
Database: arXiv
More Details
Description not available.