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Title: Way Off-Policy Batch Deep Reinforcement Learning of Human Preferences in Dialog

Paper content:
Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems are not able to learn effectively from off-policy data, especially if they cannot explore online in the environment.
This is a critical shortcoming for applying RL to real-world problems where collecting data is expensive, and models must be tested offline before being deployed to interact with the environment -- e.g. systems that learn from human interaction.
Thus, we develop a novel class of off-policy batch RL algorithms which use KL-control to penalize divergence from a pre-trained prior model of probable actions.
This KL-constraint reduces extrapolation error, enabling effective offline learning, without exploration, from a fixed batch of data.
We also use dropout-based uncertainty estimates to lower bound the target Q-values as a more efficient alternative to Double Q-Learning.
This Way Off-Policy (WOP) algorithm is tested on both traditional RL tasks from OpenAI Gym, and on the problem of open-domain dialog generation; a challenging reinforcement learning problem with a 20,000 dimensional action space.
WOP allows for the extraction of multiple different reward functions post-hoc from collected human interaction data, and can learn effectively from all of these.
We test real-world generalization by deploying dialog models live to converse with humans in an open-domain setting, and demonstrate that WOP achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art prior methods in batch deep RL.
In order to scale deep reinforcement learning (RL) to safety-critical, real-world domains, two abilities are needed.
First, since collecting real-world interaction data can be expensive and timeconsuming, algorithms must be able to learn from off-policy data no matter how it was generated, or how little correlation between the data distribution and the current policy.
Second, it is often necessary to carefully test a policy before deploying it to the real world; for example, to ensure its behavior is safe and appropriate for humans.
Thus, the algorithm must be able to learn offline first, from a static batch of data, without the ability to explore.
This off-policy, batch reinforcement learning (BRL) setting represents a challenging RL problem.
Most deep RL algorithms fail to learn from data that is not heavily correlated with the current policy (Fujimoto et al., 2018b) .
Even models based on off-policy algorithms like Q-learning fail to learn in the offline, batch setting, when the model is not able to explore.
If the batch data is not sufficient to cover the state-action space, BRL models can suffer from extrapolation error, learning unrealistic value estimates of state-action pairs not contained in the batch (Fujimoto et al., 2018b) .
It can be impossible to correct for extrapolation error when there is a mismatch in the distribution of stateactions pairs in the batch data, and the distribution induced by the learned policy.
For example, if the policy learns to select actions which are not contained in the batch, it cannot learn a reasonable value function for those actions.
Figure 1 illustrates this concept, where the batch only covers a subset of possible policies.
Extrapolation error is particularly problematic in high-dimensional state and action spaces (such as those inherent in language generation).
We propose to resolve these issues by leveraging a pre-trained generative model of the state-action space, p(a|s), trained on known sequences of interaction data.
While training with RL, we penalize divergence from this prior model with different forms of KL-control.
This technique ensures that the RL model learns a policy that stays close the state-action distribution of the batch, combating Figure 1 : In this example batch RL problem, the robot's goal is to travel the minimum distance around the black walls to get to the red flag.
A trained behavior policy generated the batch data; the probability of each of the states appearing in the batch, p B (s), is in yellow (white locations are not contained in the batch).
If the offline RL policy estimates the value of going up or left from the start position is high, it will have no way to refine this estimate using the batch data, or learn a good policy in this region of state space.
The KL-constraint ensures that the RL policy will stay within the support of the batch data.
However, the behavior policy is suboptimal, so using behavior cloning to directly imitate the batch data will result in suboptimal return.
Instead, the KL-constrained model can learn to find the optimal policy, which is within the support of the batch.
extrapolation error.
We also propose using dropout to obtain uncertainty estimates of the target Qvalues, and use this lower bound to alleviate overestimation bias.
We benchmark against a discrete adaptation of Batch Constrained Q-learning (BCQ) (Fujimoto et al., 2018b) , a recently proposed state-of-the-art BRL algorithm for continuous domains, and show that our Way Off-Policy algorithm achieves superior performance in both a traditional RL domain, as well as in a challenging, underexplored, real-world reinforcement learning problem: using implicitly expressed human reactions in chat to improve open-domain dialog systems.
When a machine learning system interacts with humans, ideally we would like to learn about the humans' preferences in order to improve its performance.
Yet having humans manually indicate their preferences through explicit means like pressing a button (e.g. Christiano et al. (2017) ) or submitting a feedback report, does not scale.
Instead, we would like to be able to use humans' implicit reactions, such as the sentiment they express, or the length of the conversation, in order to improve the policy.
However, applying off-policy batch RL to language generation is challenging because the number of potential combinations of words and sentences leads to a combinatorial explosion in the size of the state space.
The action space -the set of frequent vocabulary words in the English language -is 20,000-dimensional.
This compounds extrapolation error, making BRL even more difficult.
However, when learning from human interactions in the wild, it is crucial to be able to learn offline and test the policy before deploying it, lest it learn inappropriate behaviors (e.g. Horton (2016) ).
To support this work, we developed an interactive online platform that allows humans to chat with deep neural network dialog models running on a GPU; the BRL models trained for this study are available live at https://neural.chat/rl/.
Through this platform we collected human responses to a set of over 40 different dialog models over the course of several months.
Using our Way Off-Policy algorithm, we are able to effectively learn from this batch of data, in spite of the fact that it was generated with a vastly different set of model architectures, which were trained on different datasets.
Further, we use the batch to learn from many different reward functions designed post-hoc to extract implicit human preferences, something that is only possible with effective off-policy BRL.
In summary, the contributions of this paper are:
• A novel algorithm, Way Off-Policy learning, which is the first to propose using KL-control from a pre-trained prior model as a way to reduce extrapolation error in batch RL.
• Experiments showing the effectiveness of WOP above strong baselines based on prior work (e.g. Fujimoto et al. (2018b) ), on both traditional RL tasks and on the challenging problem of open-domain dialog generation.
• A set of novel conversation rewards based on how human preferences are implicitly expressed in text.
We are the first work to learn from implicit signals in conversation offline using batch RL.
This paper presents the Way Off-Policy (WOP) algorithm, which improves performance when learning off-policy without the possibility to explore -i.e. batch RL (BRL).
We are the first to propose using KL-control from a strong prior model pre-trained on data as a way to avoid extrapolation and instability in BRL.
Our results on traditional RL tasks demonstrate that our WOP algorithm provides performance improvements over state-of-the-art BRL techniques, and the results in dialog generation show that KL-control is critical to achieving good performance in this real-world, highdimensional setting.
In a generative domain such as dialog, the true reward function is not known, and trivially exploiting the rewards can actually lead to worse performance.
Thus, KL-control may be particularly necessary to ensure samples remain realistic and close to the data distribution.
We propose several reward functions that could allow an open-domain dialog generation model to learn from rich cues implicit in human interaction, where learning from expressed sentiment was most promising.
We find that maximizing implicit rewards leads to better performance than relying on explicit feedback.
We hope that the techniques presented here can improve learning with RL from offline data, making it easier to apply RL to safety-critical settings such as human interaction.
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assistant: text: We show that KL-control from a pre-trained prior can allow RL models to learn from a static batch of collected data, without the ability to explore online in the environment.