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Title: Improving the Generalization of Visual Navigation Policies using Invariance Regularization

Paper content:
Training agents to operate in one environment often yields overfitted models that are unable to generalize to the changes in that environment.
However, due to the numerous variations that can occur in the real-world, the agent is often required to be robust in order to be useful.
This has not been the case for agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms.
In this paper, we investigate the overfitting of RL agents to the training environments in visual navigation tasks.
Our experiments show that deep RL agents can overfit even when trained on multiple environments simultaneously.
We propose a regularization method which combines RL with supervised learning methods by adding a term to the RL objective that would encourage the invariance of a policy to variations in the observations that ought not to affect the action taken.
The results of this method, called invariance regularization, show an improvement in the generalization of policies to environments not seen during training.
Learning control policies from high-dimensional sensory input has been gaining more traction lately due to the popularity of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) Mnih et al. (2015) ; ; Zhang et al. (2018b) ; Rakelly et al. (2019) , which enables learning the perception and control modules simultaneously.
However, most of the work done in RL chooses to evaluate the learned policies in the same environment in which training occurred Cobbe et al. (2018) .
Using the same environments to train and test agents does not give any insight into the generalization abilities of the learned policy.
There could be a number of changes in the environment at test time that would degrade the agent's performance.
Variations could appear in the visual aspects that determine the agent's observation, the physical structure that determines the agent's state and even some aspects that are related to the agent's goal (Figure 1 ).
For example, different observations of the same room are encountered at different times of the day (different lighting conditions).
New obstacles could be present.
Levels of a game could be different, yet playing a few levels should often be enough to figure out how to play the rest.
Such variations might result in a new environment where the control model that defined the training environment has changed.
A robust policy should generalize from its experience and perform the same skills in the presence of these variations.
DRL agents have been notorious for overfitting to their training environments Cobbe et al. (2018) .
An agent could have drastically different performance on testing environments even if it manages to maximize the reward during training Zhang et al. (2018a) .
Supervised learning algorithms have been shown to have some generalization guarantees when adding proper regularization Mohri et al. (2018) .
However, these guarantees are weakened in reinforcement learning algorithms where the source of the data is not i.i.d..
In order to make use of the progress of DRL algorithms in practice we need policies that are robust to possible changes in the sensory inputs, surrounding structure and even some aspects of the task.
In this paper we study the notion of generalization that is appropriate for visual navigation control policies that are learned with DRL.
We present: (1) a study of the generalization of visual control policies to certain changes in the underlying dynamical system; (2) an alternative training method that combines DRL with supervised learning, thus using DRL to learn a controller while leveraging the generalization properties of supervised learning.
In our experiments we use the VizDoom platform Kempka et al. (2016) which is easily customizable and enables the generation of numerous variants of a given environment.
We present a study of the generalization capabilities of visual navigation agents trained with deep reinforcement learning algorithms.
We formalize what it means to generalize in the context of a POMDP.
We find that the tendency of RL agent to overfit even when exposed to large training sets is quite visible.
We show that using domain randomization with RL, without adding invariant features to the input such as the depth maps, is not enough to generalize.
In the second part, we proposed Invariance Regularization (IR), a method that attempts to regularize the RL model with a supervised learning loss.
It improves the generalization success and displays stable performance across different seeds.
In this work, we focused our experimentation on generalization to changes in the input observation.
However, it is also interesting to generalize the learned skills to different architectural designs of the environment, just as one one wishes to generalize to different levels of the game as proposed in the retro competition Nichol et al. (2018) .
Another avenue of future work is to explore the appropriate transformation function T of the observations.One might consider an adaptive form of T learned with data augmentation Cubuk et al. (2018) or adversarial examples Goodfellow et al. (2015 The first part consists of training RL on the observations of the original training environment, while the second part can be seen as a supervised learning objective on the transformed observations, as shown in Algorithm 1.
The first step trains RL on one environment and then use the actions that the trained policy would have taken in that environment to tune the model with supervised learning on the textured environments.
In the reported experiments using the split version, the model is trained with one iteration of the algorithm.
Therefore, the training process has two stages, train RL then train with a supervised learning setup, without iterating between both.

assistant: text: We propose a regularization term that, when added to the reinforcement learning objective, allows the policy to maximize the reward and simultaneously learn to be invariant to the irrelevant changes within the input..