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Title: Learning an off-policy predictive state representation for deep reinforcement learning for vision-based steering in autonomous driving

Paper content:
An algorithm is introduced for learning a predictive state representation with off-policy temporal difference (TD) learning that is then used to learn to steer a vehicle with reinforcement learning.
There are three components being learned simultaneously:  (1) the off-policy predictions as a compact representation of state, (2) the behavior policy distribution for estimating the off-policy predictions, and (3) the deterministic policy gradient for learning to act.
A behavior policy discriminator is learned and used for estimating the important sampling ratios needed to learn the predictive representation off-policy with general value functions (GVFs).
A linear deterministic policy gradient method is used to train the agent with only the predictive representations while the predictions are being learned.
All three components are combined, demonstrated and evaluated on the problem of steering the vehicle from images in the TORCS racing simulator environment.
Steering from only images is a challenging problem where evaluation is completed on a held-out set of tracks that were never seen during training in order to measure the generalization of the predictions and controller.
Experiments show the proposed method is able to steer smoothly and navigate many but not all of the tracks available in TORCS with performance that exceeds DDPG using only images as input and approaches the performance of an ideal non-vision based kinematics model.
Predicting the future is an important topic in machine learning and is believed to be an important part of how humans process and interact with the world, cf Clark (2013) .
Study of the brain shows that it is highly predictive of future events and outcomes.
Despite these advances, there is still much work needed to bridge the worlds of predictive learning and control.
Most predictive control approaches learn either a forward model or a backward model Lesort et al. (2018) however these next-step models suffer from compounding errors Sutton (1988) .
This paper introduces a predictive control architecture using one kind of off-policy predictive learning, called general value functions (GVFs) White (2015) Modayil et al. (2012 Schaul & Ring (2013) , that learns to predict the relevant aspects of the environment, decided by an expert, from raw sensor data such as pixel data captured from a camera.
GVFs answer the predictive question, "if I follow policy τ , how much total cumulant will I see in the future?"
The value of the GVF framework is not yet fully understood and realized despite the connections to neuroscience; but some early work has investigated its advantages for predictive representations and found that the representations are compact and general Schaul & Ring (2013) .
An objective of this research is to better understand the value that GVFs have to offer in real-world applications.
Our work is based on the hypothesis that predictive representations are good for generalization Rafols et al. (2005) Schaul & Ring (2013) .
We are motivated by the belief that GVFs, like RL, could allow for behavior that is anticipative of future consequences rather than reactive to the current state.
General value functions (GVFs) are an understudied topic of interest in AI research fields and applications.
There is a considerable focus on understanding how to learn these predictions but limited efforts on understanding how to use them in real applications.
This is unfortunate, as todate, research into applications of GVFs suggest they have potential in real world robotics and its applications Günther et al. (2016) Pilarski et al. (2013) )White (2015 Modayil et al. (2012) .
However, several elements have been missing to apply these predictions to a larger scale problem such as autonomous driving: (1) how to characterize the behavior policy to achieve off-policy learning when it is unknown, (2) what predictions are useful, and (3) how to use those predictions to control the vehicle.
Our objective is two-fold: (1) introduce a novel architecture combining elements of predictive learning, adversarial learning and reinforcement learning, and (2) demonstrate how this architecture can be used to steer a vehicle in a racing simulator.
A method of learning a predictive representation off-policy is presented where the behavior policy distribution is estimated via an adversarial method employing the density ratio trick.
It is demonstrated that deep off-policy predictions can be learned with a deep behavior policy estimation to predict future lane centeredness and road angles from images.
The predictive representation is learned with linear deterministic policy gradient.
All of these components are combined together in a framework called GVF-DPG and learned simultaneously on the challenging problem of steering a vehicle in TORCS from only images.
The results show that the GVF-DPG is able to steer smoothly with less change in action and achieve better performance than DDPG from only images and similar performance to the kinematics model in several but not all of the test tracks.
This work is also a demonstration that we can learn off-policy predictions, characterize the behavior policy and learn the controller all at the same time despite the challenges of the behavior policy evolving with the agent and the predictive state representation changing over time.
Our work demonstrates that a learned prediction-based vision-only steering controller could potentially be viable with more work on improving the generalizability of the off-policy predictions.
This work supports the predictive state representation hypothesis in Rafols et al. (2005) that deep predictions can improve the generalization of RL to new road environments when using only images as input.
For future work, we hope to study how to learn the question for the predictive state representation: τ , γ, and c.
Moreover, because the behavior policy is unknown and estimated, our results suggest that collecting real-world human driving to train predictions off-policy without the need for a simulator could be a viable approach to steering a vehicle from images.
This is potentially advantageous since the human driver can explore the road safely.

assistant: text: An algorithm to learn a predictive state representation with general value functions and off-policy learning is applied to the problem of vision-based steering in autonomous driving.