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Title: Model-Augmented Actor-Critic: Backpropagating through Paths

Paper content:
Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning.
In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the model by exploiting its differentiability.
We construct a policy optimization algorithm that uses the pathwise derivative of the learned model and policy across future timesteps.
Instabilities of learning across many timesteps are prevented by using a terminal value function, learning the policy in an actor-critic fashion.
Furthermore, we present a derivation on the monotonic improvement of our objective in terms of the gradient error in the model and value function.
We show that our approach
(i) is consistently more sample efficient than existing state-of-the-art model-based algorithms,
(ii) matches the asymptotic performance of model-free algorithms, and
(iii) scales to long horizons, a regime where typically past model-based approaches have struggled.
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers the potential to be a general-purpose tool for learning complex policies while being sample efficient.
When learning in real-world physical systems, data collection can be an arduous process.
Contrary to model-free methods, model-based approaches are appealing due to their comparatively fast learning.
By first learning the dynamics of the system in a supervised learning way, it can exploit off-policy data.
Then, model-based methods use the model to derive controllers from it either parametric controllers (Luo et al., 2019; Buckman et al., 2018; Janner et al., 2019) or non-parametric controllers (Nagabandi et al., 2017; Chua et al., 2018) .
Current model-based methods learn with an order of magnitude less data than their model-free counterparts while achieving the same asymptotic convergence.
Tools like ensembles, probabilistic models, planning over shorter horizons, and meta-learning have been used to achieved such performance (Kurutach et al., 2018; Chua et al., 2018; .
However, the model usage in all of these methods is the same: simple data augmentation.
They use the learned model as a black-box simulator generating samples from it.
In high-dimensional environments or environments that require longer planning, substantial sampling is needed to provide meaningful signal for the policy.
Can we further exploit our learned models?
In this work, we propose to estimate the policy gradient by backpropagating its gradient through the model using the pathwise derivative estimator.
Since the learned model is differentiable, one can link together the model, reward function, and policy to obtain an analytic expression for the gradient of the returns with respect to the policy.
By computing the gradient in this manner, we obtain an expressive signal that allows rapid policy learning.
We avoid the instabilities that often result from back-propagating through long horizons by using a terminal Q-function.
This scheme fully exploits the learned model without harming the learning stability seen in previous approaches (Kurutach et al., 2018; .
The horizon at which we apply the terminal Q-function acts as a hyperparameter between model-free (when fully relying on the Q-function) and model-based (when using a longer horizon) of our algorithm.
The main contribution of this work is a model-based method that significantly reduces the sample complexity compared to state-of-the-art model-based algorithms (Janner et al., 2019; Buckman et al., 2018) .
For instance, we achieve a 10k return in the half-cheetah environment in just 50 trajectories.
We theoretically justify our optimization objective and derive the monotonic improvement of our learned policy in terms of the Q-function and the model error.
Furtermore, we experimentally analyze the theoretical derivations.
Finally, we pinpoint the importance of our objective by ablating all the components of our algorithm.
The results are reported in four model-based benchmarking environments Todorov et al., 2012) .
The low sample complexity and high performance of our method carry high promise towards learning directly on real robots.
In this work, we present model-augmented actor-critic, MAAC, a reinforcement learning algorithm that makes use of a learned model by using the pathwise derivative across future timesteps.
We prevent instabilities arisen from backpropagation through time by the means of a terminal value function.
The objective is theoretically analyzed in terms of the model and value error, and we derive a policy improvement expression with respect to those terms.
Our algorithm that builds on top of MAAC is able to achieve superior performance and sample efficiency than state-of-the-art model-based and model-free reinforcement learning algorithms.
For future work, it would be enticing to deploy the presented algorithm on a real-robotic agent.
Then, the error in the gradient in the previous term is bounded by
In order to bound the model term we need first to bound the rewards since
Similar to the previous bounds, we can bound now each reward term by
With this result we can bound the total error in models
Then, the gradient error has the form
A.2
PROOF OF LEMMA 4.2
The total variation distance can be bounded by the KL-divergence using the Pinsker's inequality
Then if we assume third order smoothness on our policy, by the Fisher information metric theorem then
Given that θ −θ 2 = α ∇ θ J π − ∇ θĴπ 2 , for a small enough step the following inequality holds Given the bound on the total variation distance, we can now make use of the monotonic improvement theorem to establish an improvement bound in terms of the gradient error.
Let J π (θ) and J π (θ) be the expected return of the policy π θ and πθ under the true dynamics.
Let ρ andρ be the discounted state marginal for the policy π θ and πθ, respectively Then, combining the results from Lemma 4.2 we obtain the desired bound.

assistant: text: Policy gradient through backpropagation through time using learned models and Q-functions. SOTA results in reinforcement learning benchmark environments.