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Title: Learning Exploration Policies for Model-Agnostic Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
Meta-Reinforcement learning approaches aim to develop learning procedures that can adapt quickly to a distribution of tasks with the help of a few examples.
Developing efficient exploration strategies capable of finding the most useful samples becomes critical in such settings.
Existing approaches to finding efficient exploration strategies add auxiliary objectives to promote exploration by the pre-update policy, however, this makes the adaptation using a few gradient steps difficult as the pre-update (exploration) and post-update (exploitation) policies are quite different.
Instead, we propose to explicitly model a separate exploration policy for the task distribution.
Having two different policies gives more flexibility in training the exploration policy and also makes adaptation to any specific task easier.
We show that using self-supervised or supervised learning objectives for adaptation stabilizes the training process and also demonstrate the superior performance of our model compared to prior works in this domain.
Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have seen many successes in recent years, from mastering the complex game of Go BID10 to even discovering molecules BID8 .
However, a common limitation of these methods is their propensity to overfitting on a single task and inability to adapt to even slightly perturbed configuration BID12 .
On the other hand, humans have this astonishing ability to learn new tasks in a matter of minutes by using their prior knowledge and understanding of the underlying task mechanics.
Drawing inspiration from human behaviors, researchers have proposed to incorporate multiple inductive biases and heuristics to help the models learn quickly and generalize to unseen scenarios.
However, despite a lot of effort it has been difficult to approach human levels of data efficiency and generalization.Meta-RL tries to address these shortcomings by learning these inductive biases and heuristics from the data itself.
These inductive biases or heuristics can be induced in the model in various ways like optimization, policy initialization, loss function, exploration strategies, etc.
Recently, a class of policy initialization based meta-learning approaches have gained attention like Model Agnostic MetaLearning (MAML) BID1 .
MAML finds a good initialization for a policy that can be adapted to a new task by fine-tuning with policy gradient updates from a few samples of that task.Given the objective of meta RL algorithms to adapt to a new task from a few examples, efficient exploration strategies are crucial for quickly finding the optimal policy in a new environment.
Some recent works BID3 have tried to address this problem by using latent variables to model the distribution of exploration behaviors.
Another set of approaches BID11 BID9 focus on improving the credit assignment of the meta learning objective to the pre-update trajectory distribution.
However, all these prior works use one or few policy gradient updates to transition from preto post-update policy.
This limits the applicability of these methods to cases where the post-update (exploitation) policy is similar to the pre-update (exploration) policy and can be obtained with only a few updates.
Also, for cases where pre-and post-update policies are expected to exhibit different behaviors, large gradient updates may result in training instabilities and lack of convergence.
To address this problem, we propose to explicitly model a separate exploration policy for the distribution of tasks.
The exploration policy is trained to find trajectories that can lead to fast adaptation of the exploitation policy on the given task.
This formulation provides much more flexibility in training the exploration policy.
In the process, we also establish that, in order to adapt as quickly as possible to the new task, it is often more useful to use self-supervised or supervised learning approaches, where possible, to get more effective updates.
Unlike conventional meta-RL approaches, we proposed to explicitly model a separate exploration policy for the task distribution.
Having two different policies gives more flexibility in training the exploration policy and also makes adaptation to any specific task easier.
Hence, as future work, we would like to explore the use of separate exploration and exploitation policies in other meta-learning approaches as well.
We showed that, through various experiments on both sparse and dense reward tasks, our model outperforms previous works while also being very stable during training.
This validates that using self-supervised techniques increases the stability of these updates thus allowing us to use a separate exploration policy to collect the initial trajectories.
Further, we also show that the variance reduction techniques used in the objective of exploration policy also have a huge impact on the performance.
However, we would like to note that the idea of using a separate exploration and exploitation policy is much more general and doesn't need to be restricted to MAML.
that to compute M β,z (s t , a t ) = w T β m β (s t , a t ).
Using the successor representations can effectively be seen as using a more accurate/powerful baseline than directly predicting the N-step returns using the (s t , a t )pair.

assistant: text: We propose to use a separate exploration policy to collect the pre-adaptation trajectories in MAML. We also show that using a self-supervised objective in the inner loop leads to more stable training and much better performance.