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Title: Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization

Paper content:
As reinforcement learning continues to drive machine intelligence beyond its conventional boundary, unsubstantial practices in sparse reward environment severely limit further applications in a broader range of advanced fields.
Motivated by the demand for an effective deep reinforcement learning algorithm that accommodates sparse reward environment, this paper presents Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization (HTRPO), a method that efficiently utilizes interactions in sparse reward conditions to optimize policies within trust region and, in the meantime, maintains learning stability.
Firstly, we theoretically adapt the TRPO objective function, in the form of the expected return of the policy, to the distribution of hindsight data generated from the alternative goals.
Then, we apply Monte Carlo with importance sampling to estimate KL-divergence between two policies, taking the hindsight data as input.
Under the condition that the distributions are sufficiently close, the KL-divergence is approximated by another f-divergence.
Such approximation results in the decrease of variance and alleviates the instability during policy update.
Experimental results on both discrete and continuous benchmark tasks demonstrate that HTRPO converges significantly faster than previous policy gradient methods.
It achieves effective performances and high data-efficiency for training policies in sparse reward environments.
Reinforcement Learning has been a heuristic approach confronting a great many real-world problems from playing complex strategic games (Mnih et al., 2015; Silver et al., 2016; Justesen et al., 2019) to the precise control of robots (Levine et al., 2016; Mahler & Goldberg, 2017; Quillen et al., 2018) , in which policy gradient methods play very important roles (Sutton et al., 2000; Deisenroth et al., 2013) .
Among them, the ones based on trust region including Trust Region Policy Optimization (Schulman et al., 2015a) and Proximal Policy Optimization (Schulman et al., 2017) have achieved stable and effective performances on several benchmark tasks.
Later on, they have been verified in a variety of applications including skill learning (Nagabandi et al., 2018) , multi-agent control (Gupta et al., 2017) , imitation learning (Ho et al., 2016) , and have been investigated further to be combined with more advanced techniques (Nachum et al., 2017; Houthooft et al., 2016; Heess et al., 2017) .
One unresolved core issue in reinforcement learning is efficiently training the agent in sparse reward environments, in which the agent is given a distinctively high feedback only upon reaching the desired final goal state.
On one hand, generalizing reinforcement learning methods to sparse reward scenarios obviates designing delicate reward mechanism, which is known as reward shaping (Ng et al., 1999) ; on the other hand, receiving rewards only when precisely reaching the final goal states also guarantees that the agent can focus on the intended task itself without any deviation.
Despite the extensive use of policy gradient methods, they tend to be vulnerable when dealing with sparse reward scenarios.
Admittedly, policy gradient may work in simple and sufficiently rewarding environments through massive random exploration.
However, since it relies heavily on the expected return, the chances in complex and sparsely rewarding scenarios become rather slim, which often makes it unfeasible to converge to a policy by exploring randomly.
Recently, several works have been devoted to solving the problem of sparse reward, mainly applying either hierarchical reinforcement learning (Kulkarni et al., 2016; Vezhnevets et al., 2017; Le et al., 2018; Marino et al., 2019) or a hindsight methodology, including Hindsight Experience Replay (Andrychowicz et al., 2017) , Hindsight Policy Gradient (Rauber et al., 2019) and their extensions (Fang et al., 2019; Levy et al., 2019) .
The idea of Hindsight Experience Replay(HER) is to regard the ending states obtained through the interaction under current policy as alternative goals, and therefore generate more effective training data comparing to that with only real goals.
Such augmentation overcomes the defects of random exploration and allows the agent to progressively move towards intended goals.
It is proven to be promising when dealing with sparse reward reinforcement learning problems.
For Hindsight Policy Gradient(HPG), it introduces hindsight to policy gradient approach and improves sample efficiency in sparse reward environments.
Yet, its learning curve for policy update still oscillates considerably.
Because it inherits the intrinsic high variance of policy gradient methods which has been widely studied in Schulman et al. (2015b) , Gu et al. (2016) and Wu et al. (2018) .
Furthermore, introducing hindsight to policy gradient methods would lead to greater variance (Rauber et al., 2019) .
Consequently, such exacerbation would cause obstructive instability during the optimization process.
To design an advanced and efficient on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm with hindsight experience, the main problem is the contradiction between on-policy data needed by the training process and the severely off-policy hindsight experience we can get.
Moreover, for TRPO, one of the most significant property is the approximated monotonic converging process.
Therefore, how these advantages can be preserved when the agent is trained with hindsight data also remains unsolved.
In this paper, we propose a methodology called Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization (HTRPO).
Starting from TRPO, a hindsight form of policy optimization problem within trust region is theoretically derived, which can be approximately solved with the Monte Carlo estimator using severely off-policy hindsight experience data.
HTRPO extends the effective and monotonically iterative policy optimization procedure within trust region to accommodate sparse reward environments.
In HTRPO, both the objective function and the expectation of KL divergence between policies are estimated using generated hindsight data instead of on-policy data.
To overcome the high variance and instability in KL divergence estimation, another f -divergence is applied to approximate KL divergence, and both theoretically and practically, it is proved to be more efficient and stable.
We demonstrate that on several benchmark tasks, HTRPO can significantly improve the performance and sample efficiency in sparse reward scenarios while maintains the learning stability.
From the experiments, we illustrate that HTRPO can be neatly applied to not only simple discrete tasks but continuous environments as well.
Besides, it is verified that HTRPO can be generalized to different hyperparameter settings with little impact on performance level.
We have extended the monotonically converging on-policy algorithm TRPO to accommodate sparse reward environments by adopting the hindsight methodology.
The optimization problem in TRPO is scrupulously derived into hindsight formulation and, when the KL-divergence in the constraint function is small enough, it can be tactfully approximated by another f -divergence in order to reduce estimation variance and improve learning stability.
Experimental results on a variety of environments demonstrate effective performances of HTRPO, and validate its sample efficiency and stable policy update quality in both discrete and continuous scenarios.
Therefore, this work reveals HTRPO's vast potential in solving sparse reward reinforcement learning problems.

assistant: text: This paper proposes an advanced policy optimization method with hindsight experience for sparse reward reinforcement learning.