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Training Agents using Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning

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arxiv 1912.02877 v2 pith:ZUKJXHAM submitted 2019-12-05 cs.LG cs.AIcs.RO

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.RO
keywords learningagentsrewardtrainingudrlalgorithmsdevelopmuch
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We develop Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning (UDRL), a method for learning to act using only supervised learning techniques. Unlike traditional algorithms, UDRL does not use reward prediction or search for an optimal policy. Instead, it trains agents to follow commands such as "obtain so much total reward in so much time." Many of its general principles are outlined in a companion report; the goal of this paper is to develop a practical learning algorithm and show that this conceptually simple perspective on agent training can produce a range of rewarding behaviors for multiple episodic environments. Experiments show that on some tasks UDRL's performance can be surprisingly competitive with, and even exceed that of some traditional baseline algorithms developed over decades of research. Based on these results, we suggest that alternative approaches to expected reward maximization have an important role to play in training useful autonomous agents.

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Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Success Conditioning as Policy Improvement: The Optimization Problem Solved by Imitating Success

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  5. How to Provably Improve Return Conditioned Supervised Learning?

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