直接优化零样本强化学习损失,无需依赖下游任务分布。
Tackling the Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning Loss Directly
- 证明可直接优化零样本RL损失,适用于白噪声、平滑等非信息先验。
- 白噪声先验下目标函数与VISR几乎一致,解释了其设计合理性。
- 为零样本强化学习提供算法化特征学习新路径,适合研究者参考。
零样本强化学习方法旨在仅根据奖励函数描述即时生成环境中的行为。这类方法通常通过在一系列下游任务上的平均性能进行评估,但无法直接针对该目标训练,除非已知下游任务的分布。现有方法要么采用其他学习准则(如BBQ+18, TRO23, TO21, HDB+19),要么显式设定下游任务先验,例如由随机神经网络给出的奖励函数(FPAL24)。本文证明,对于包括白噪声奖励、时间平滑奖励、稀疏散列奖励或其组合在内的多种非信息先验,零样本RL损失可被直接优化。因此,可在广泛混合的先验下算法化地学习最优零样本特征。令人惊讶的是,白噪声先验导出的目标函数几乎与VISR(HDB+19)相同,但方法不同。这表明VISR中某些看似任意的选择(如冯·米塞斯-费舍尔分布)实际上能最大化下游性能,也暗示了更高效求解VISR目标的方法。最后,我们讨论了零样本RL目标的一些后果与局限,例如仅使用高斯密集奖励先验时,易导致最优特征过窄。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim at instantly producing a behavior for an RL task in a given environment, from a description of the reward function. These methods are usually tested by evaluating their average performance on a series of downstream tasks. Yet they cannot be trained directly for that objective, unless the distribution of downstream tasks is known. Existing approaches either use other learning criteria [BBQ+ 18, TRO23, TO21, HDB+ 19], or explicitly set a prior on downstream tasks, such as reward functions given by a random neural network [FPAL24]. Here we prove that the zero-shot RL loss can be optimized directly, for a range of non-informative priors such as white noise rewards, temporally smooth rewards, ``scattered'' sparse rewards, or a combination of those. Thus, it is possible to learn the optimal zero-shot features algorithmically, for a wide mixture of priors. Surprisingly, the white noise prior leads to an objective almost identical to the one in VISR [HDB+19], via a different approach. This shows that some seemingly arbitrary choices in VISR, such as Von Mises--Fisher distributions, do maximize downstream performance. This also suggests more efficient ways to tackle the VISR objective. Finally, we discuss some consequences and limitations of the zero-shot RL objective, such as its tendency to produce narrow optimal features if only using Gaussian dense reward priors.
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