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Title: MULTIPOLAR: Multi-Source Policy Aggregation for Transfer Reinforcement Learning between Diverse Environmental Dynamics

Paper content:
Transfer reinforcement learning (RL) aims at improving learning efficiency of an agent by exploiting knowledge from other source agents trained on relevant tasks.
However, it remains challenging to transfer knowledge between different environmental dynamics without having access to the source environments.
In this work, we explore a new challenge in transfer RL, where only a set of source policies collected under unknown diverse dynamics is available for learning a target task efficiently.
To address this problem, the proposed approach, MULTI-source POLicy AggRegation (MULTIPOLAR), comprises two key techniques.
We learn to aggregate the actions provided by the source policies adaptively to maximize the target task performance.
Meanwhile, we learn an auxiliary network that predicts residuals around the aggregated actions, which ensures the target policy's expressiveness even when some of the source policies perform poorly.
We demonstrated the effectiveness of MULTIPOLAR through an extensive experimental evaluation across six simulated environments ranging from classic control problems to challenging robotics simulations, under both continuous and discrete action spaces.
We envision a future scenario where a variety of robotic systems, which are each trained or manually engineered to solve a similar task, provide their policies for a new robot to learn a relevant task quickly.
For example, imagine various pick-and-place robots working in factories all over the world.
Depending on the manufacturer, these robots will differ in their kinematics (e.g., link length, joint orientations) and dynamics (e.g., link mass, joint damping, friction, inertia).
They could provide their policies to a new robot (Devin et al., 2017) , even though their dynamics factors, on which the policies are implicitly conditioned, are not typically available (Chen et al., 2018) .
Moreover, we cannot rely on a history of their individual experiences, as they may be unavailable due to a lack of communication between factories or prohibitively large dataset sizes.
In such scenarios, we argue that a key technique to develop is the ability to transfer knowledge from a collection of robots to a new robot quickly only by exploiting their policies while being agnostic to their different kinematics and dynamics, rather than collecting a vast amount of samples to train the new robot from scratch.
The scenario illustrated above poses a new challenge in the transfer learning for reinforcement learning (RL) domains.
Formally, consider multiple instances of a single environment that differ in their state transition dynamics, e.g., independent ant robots with different leg designs in Figure 1 , which reach different locations by executing the same walking actions.
These source agents interacting with one of the environment instances provide their deterministic policy to a new target agent in another environment instance.
Then, our problem is: can we efficiently learn the policy of a target agent given only the collection of source policies?
Note that information about source environmental dynamics, such as the exact state transition distribu- Figure 2 : Overview of MULTIPOLAR.
We formulate a target policy π target with the sum of
1) the adaptive aggregation F agg of deterministic actions from source policies L and
2) the auxiliary network F aux for predicting residuals around F agg .
tions and the history of environmental states, will not be visible to the target agent as mentioned above.
Also, the source policies are neither trained nor hand-engineered for the target environment instance, and therefore not guaranteed to work optimally and may even fail (Chen et al., 2018) .
These conditions prevent us from adopting existing work on transfer RL between different environmental dynamics, as they require access to source environment instances or their dynamics for training a target policy (e.g., Lazaric et al. (2008) ; Chen et al. (2018) ; Yu et al. (2019) ; Tirinzoni et al. (2018) ).
Similarly, meta-learning approaches (Vanschoren, 2018; Saemundsson et al., 2018; Clavera et al., 2019 ) cannot be used here because they typically train an agent on a diverse set of tasks (i.e., environment instances).
Also, existing techniques that utilize a collection of source policies, e.g., policy reuse frameworks (Fernández & Veloso, 2006; Rosman et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2018) and option frameworks (Sutton et al., 1999; Bacon et al., 2017; Mankowitz et al., 2018) , are not a promising solution because, to our knowledge, they assume source policies have the same environmental dynamics but have different goals.
As a solution to the problem, we propose a new transfer RL approach named MULTI-source POLicy AggRegation (MULTIPOLAR).
As shown in Figure 2 , our key idea is twofold;
1) In a target policy, we adaptively aggregate the deterministic actions produced by a collection of source policies.
By learning aggregation parameters to maximize the expected return at a target environment instance, we can better adapt the aggregated actions to unseen environmental dynamics of the target instance without knowing source environmental dynamics nor source policy performances.
2) We also train an auxiliary network that predicts a residual around the aggregated actions, which is crucial for ensuring the expressiveness of the target policy even when some source policies are not useful.
As another notable advantage, the proposed MULTIPOLAR can be used for both continuous and discrete action spaces with few modifications while allowing a target policy to be trained in a principled fashion.
Similar to Ammar et al. (2014) ; Song et al. (2016) ; Chen et al. (2018) ; Tirinzoni et al. (2018) ; Yu et al. (2019) , our method assumes that the environment structure (state/action space) is identical between the source and target environments, while dynamics/kinematics parameters are different.
This assumption holds in many real-world applications such as in sim-to-real tasks (Tan et al., 2018) , industrial insertion tasks (Schoettler et al., 2019) (different dynamics comes from the differences in parts), and wearable robots (Zhang et al., 2017) (with users as dynamics).
We evaluate MULTIPOLAR in a variety of environments ranging from classic control problems to challenging robotics simulations.
Our experimental results demonstrate the significant improvement of sample efficiency with the proposed approach, compared to baselines that trained a target policy from scratch or from a single source policy.
We also conducted a detailed analysis of our approach and found it works well even when some of the source policies performed poorly in their original environment instance.
Main contributions: (1) a new transfer RL problem that leverages multiple source policies collected under diverse environmental dynamics to train a target policy in another dynamics, and (2) MULTIPOLAR, a simple yet principled and effective solution verified in our extensive experiments.
Reinforcement Learning We formulate our problem under the standard RL framework (Sutton & Barto, 1998) , where an agent interacts with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP).
An MDP is represented by the tuple M = (ρ 0 , γ, S, A, R, T ) where ρ 0 is the initial state distribution and γ is a discount factor.
At each timestep t, given the current state s t ∈ S, the agent executes an action a t ∈ A based on its policy π(a t | s t ; θ) that is parameterized by θ.
The environment returns a reward R(s t , a t ) ∈ R and transitions to the next state s t+1 based on the state transition distribution T (s t+1 | s t , a t ).
In this framework, RL aims to maximize the expected return with respect to the policy parameters θ.
Our work is broadly categorized as an instance of transfer RL (Taylor & Stone, 2009) , in which a policy for a target task is trained using information collected from source tasks.
In this section, we highlight how our work is different from the existing approaches and also discuss the current limitations as well as future directions.
Transfer between Different Dynamics There has been very limited work on transferring knowledge between agents in different environmental dynamics.
As introduced briefly in Section 1, some methods require training samples collected from source tasks.
These sampled experiences are then used for measuring the similarity between environment instances (Lazaric et al., 2008; Ammar et al., 2014; Tirinzoni et al., 2018) or for conditioning a target policy to predict actions (Chen et al., 2018) .
Alternative means to quantify the similarity is to use a full specification of MDPs (Song et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2019) or environmental dynamics Yu et al. (2019) .
In contrast, the proposed MULTI-POLAR allows the knowledge transfer only through the policies acquired from source environment instances, which is beneficial when source and target environments are not always connected to exchange information about their environmental dynamics and training samples.
Leveraging Multiple Policies The idea of utilizing multiple source policies can be found in the literature of policy reuse frameworks (Fernández & Veloso, 2006; Rosman et al., 2016; Li & Zhang, 2018; Zheng et al., 2018; Li et al., 2019) .
The basic motivation behind these works is to provide "nearly-optimal solutions" (Rosman et al., 2016) for short-duration tasks by reusing one of the source policies, where each source would perform well on environment instances with different rewards (e.g., different goals in maze tasks).
In our problem setting, where environmental dynamics behind each source policy are different, reusing a single policy without an adaptation is not the right approach, as described in (Chen et al., 2018) and also demonstrated in our experiment.
Another relevant idea is hierarchical RL (Barto & Mahadevan, 2003; Kulkarni et al., 2016; Osa et al., 2019) that involves a hierarchy of policies (or action-value functions) to enable temporal abstraction.
In particular, option frameworks (Sutton et al., 1999; Bacon et al., 2017; Mankowitz et al., 2018 ) make use of a collection of policies as a part of "options".
However, they assumed all the policies in the hierarchy to be learned in a single environment instance.
Another relevant work along this line of research is (Frans et al., 2018) , which meta-learns a hierarchy of multiple sub-policies by training a master policy over the distribution of tasks.
Nevertheless, hierarchical RL approaches are not useful for leveraging multiple source policies each acquired under diverse environmental dynamics.
Learning Residuals in RL Finally, some recent works adopt residual learning to mitigate the limited performance of hand-engineered policies (Silver et al., 2018; Johannink et al., 2019; Rana et al., 2019) .
We are interested in a more extended scenario where various source policies with unknown performances are provided instead of a single sub-optimal policy.
Also, these approaches focus only on RL problems for robotic tasks in the continuous action space, while our approach could work on both of continuous and discrete action spaces in a broad range of environments.
Limitations and Future Directions Currently, our work has several limitations.
First, MULTI-POLAR may not be scalable to a large number of source policies, as its training and testing times will increase almost linearly with the number of source policies.
One possible solution for this issue would be pre-screening source policies before starting to train a target agent, for example, by testing each source on the target task and taking them into account in the training phase only when they are found useful.
Moreover, our work assumes source and target environment instances to be different only in their state transition distribution.
An interesting direction for future work is to involve other types of environmental differences, such as dissimilar rewards and state/action spaces.
We presented a new problem setting of transfer RL that aimed to train a policy efficiently using a collection of source policies acquired under diverse environmental dynamics.
We demonstrated that the proposed MULTIPOLAR is, despite its simplicity, a principled approach with high training sample efficiency on a variety of environments.
Our transfer RL approach is advantageous when one does not have access to a distribution of diverse environmental dynamics.
Future work will seek to adapt our approach to more challenging domains such as a real-world robotics task.

assistant: text: We propose MULTIPOLAR, a transfer RL method that leverages a set of source policies collected under unknown diverse environmental dynamics to efficiently learn a target policy in another dynamics.