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Title: Progressive Reinforcement Learning with Distillation for Multi-Skilled Motion Control

Paper content:
Deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated increasing capabilities for continuous control problems,
including agents that can move with skill and agility through their environment.
An open problem in this setting is that of developing good strategies for integrating or merging policies
for multiple skills, where each individual skill is a specialist in a specific skill and its associated state distribution.
We extend policy distillation methods to the continuous action setting and leverage this technique to combine \expert policies,
as evaluated in the domain of simulated bipedal locomotion across different classes of terrain.
We also introduce an input injection method for augmenting an existing policy network to exploit new input features.
Lastly, our method uses transfer learning to assist in the efficient acquisition of new skills.
The combination of these methods allows a policy to be incrementally augmented with new skills.
We compare our progressive learning and integration via distillation (PLAID) method
against three alternative baselines.
As they gain experience, humans develop rich repertoires of motion skills that are useful in different contexts and environments.
Recent advances in reinforcement learning provide an opportunity to understand how motion repertoires can best be learned, recalled, and augmented.
Inspired by studies on the development and recall of movement patterns useful for different locomotion contexts BID17 , we develop and evaluate an approach for learning multi-skilled movement repertoires.
In what follows, we refer to the proposed method as PLAID: Progressive Learning and Integration via Distillation.For long lived applications of complex control tasks a learning system may need to acquire and integrate additional skills.
Accordingly, our problem is defined by the sequential acquisition and integration of new skills.
Given an existing controller that is capable of one-or-more skills, we wish to:
(a) efficiently learn a new skill or movement pattern in a way that is informed by the existing control policy, and
(b) to reintegrate that into a single controller that is capable of the full motion repertoire.
This process can then be repeated as necessary.
We view PLAID as a continual learning method, in that we consider a context where all tasks are not known in advance and we wish to learn any new task in an efficient manner.
However, it is also proves surprisingly effective as a multitask solution, given the three specific benchmarks that we compare against.
In the process of acquiring a new skill, we also allow for a control policy to be augmented with additional inputs, without adversely impacting its performance.
This is a process we refer to as input injection.Understanding the time course of sensorimotor learning in human motor control is an open research problem BID31 ) that exists concurrently with recent advances in deep reinforcement learning.
Issues of generalization, context-dependent recall, transfer or "savings" in fast learning, forgetting, and scalability are all in play for both human motor control models and the learning curricula proposed in reinforcement learning.
While the development of hierarchical models for skills offers one particular solution that supports scalability and that avoids problems related to forgetting, we eschew this approach in this work and instead investigate a progressive approach to integration into a control policy defined by a single deep network.Distillation refers to the problem of combining the policies of one or more experts in order to create one single controller that can perform the tasks of a set of experts.
It can be cast as a supervised regression problem where the objective is to learn a model that matches the output distributions of all expert policies BID13 BID28 BID19 .
However, given a new task for which an expert is not given, it is less clear how to learn the new task while successfully integrating this new skill in the pre-existing repertoire of the control policy for an agent.
One wellknown technique in machine learning to significantly improve sample efficiency across similar tasks is to use Transfer Learning (TL) BID12 , which seeks to reuse knowledge learned from solving a previous task to efficiently learn a new task.
However, transferring knowledge from previous tasks to new tasks may not be straightforward; there can be negative transfer wherein a previously-trained model can take longer to learn a new task via fine-tuning than would a randomlyinitialized model BID16 .
Additionally, while learning a new skill, the control policy should not forget how to perform old skills.The core contribution of this paper is a method Progressive Learning and Integration via Distillation (PLAiD) to repeatedly expand and integrate a motion control repertoire.
The main building blocks consist of policy transfer and multi-task policy distillation, and the method is evaluated in the context of a continuous motor control problem, that of robust locomotion over distinct classes of terrain.
We evaluate the method against three alternative baselines.
We also introduce input injection, a convenient mechanism for adding inputs to control policies in support of new skills, while preserving existing capabilities.
MultiTasker vs PLAiD: The MultiTasker may be able to produce a policy that has higher overall average reward, but in practise constraints can keep the method from combining skills gracefully.
If the reward functions are different between tasks, the MultiTasker can favour a task with higher rewards, as these tasks may receive higher advantage.
It is also a non-trivial task to normalize the reward functions for each task in order to combine them.
The MultiTasker may also favour tasks that are easier than other tasks in general.
We have shown that the PLAiD scales better with respect to the number of tasks than the MultiTasker.
We expect PLAiD would further outperform the MultiTasker if the tasks were more difficult and the reward functions dissimilar.In our evaluation we compare the number of iterations PLAiD uses to the number the MultiTasker uses on only the new task, which is not necessarily fair.
The MultiTasker gains its benefits from training on the other tasks together.
If the idea is to reduce the number of simulation samples that are needed to learn new tasks then the MultiTasker would fall far behind.
Distillation is also very efficient with respect to the number of simulation steps needed.
Data could be collected from the simulator in groups and learned from in many batches before more data is needed as is common for behavioural cloning.
We expect another reason distillation benefits learning multiple tasks is that the integration process assists in pulling policies out of the local minima RL is prone to.Transfer Learning: Because we are using an actor-critic learning method, we also studied the possibility of using the value functions for TL.
We did not discover any empirical evidence that this assisted the learning process.
When transferring to a new task, the state distribution has changed and the reward function may be completely different.
This makes it unlikely that the value function will be accurate on this new task.
In addition, value functions are in general easier and faster to learn than policies, implying that value function reuse is less important to transfer.
We also find that helpfulness of TL depends on not only the task difficulty but the reward function as well.
Two tasks may overlap in state space but the area they overlap could be easily reachable.
In this case TL may not give significant benefit because the overall RL problem is easy.
The greatest benefit is gained from TL when the state space that overlaps for two tasks is difficult to reach and in that difficult to reach area is where the highest rewards are achieved.
We have proposed and evaluated a method for the progressive learning and integration (via distillation) of motion skills.
The method exploits transfer learning to speed learning of new skills, along with input injection where needed, as well as continuous-action distillation, using DAGGER-style learning.
This compares favorably to baselines consisting of learning all skills together, or learning all the skills individually before integration.
We believe that there remains much to learned about the best training and integration methods for movement skill repertoires, as is also reflected in the human motor learning literature.We augment the blind network design by adding features for terrain to create an agent with sight.
This network with terrain features has a single convolution layer with 8 filters of width 3.
This constitutional layer is followed by a dense layer of 32 units.
The dense layer is then concatenated twice, once along each of the original two hidden layers in the blind version of the policy.

assistant: text: A continual learning method that uses distillation to combine expert policies and transfer learning to accelerate learning new skills.