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Title: AMRL: Aggregated Memory For Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
In many partially observable scenarios, Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents must rely on long-term memory in order to learn an optimal policy.
We demonstrate that using techniques from NLP and supervised learning fails at RL tasks due to stochasticity from the environment and from exploration.
Utilizing our insights on the limitations of traditional memory methods in RL, we propose AMRL, a class of models that can learn better policies with greater sample efficiency and are resilient to noisy inputs.
Specifically, our models use a standard memory module to summarize short-term context, and then aggregate all prior states from the standard model without respect to order.
We show that this provides advantages both in terms of gradient decay and signal-to-noise ratio over time.
Evaluating in Minecraft and maze environments that test long-term memory, we find that our model improves average return by 19% over a baseline that has the same number of parameters and by 9% over a stronger baseline that has far more parameters.
We address the problem of reinforcement learning (RL) in tasks that require long-term memory.
While many successes of Deep RL were achieved in settings that are (near) fully observable, such as Atari games (Mnih et al., 2015) , partial observability requires memory to recall prior observations that indicate the current state.
Relying on full observability severely limits the applicability of such approaches.
For example, many tasks in virtual and physical environments are naturally observed from a first-person perspective (Oh et al., 2016) , which means that an agent may need to seek out and remember task-relevant information that is not immediately observable without directly observing the entire environment.
Recent research has started to address this issue, but effective learning in RL settings with long sequential dependencies remain a key challenge in Deep RL (Oh et al., 2016; Stepleton et al., 2018; Parisotto & Salakhutdinov, 2018) .
The currently most common approach to RL in partially observable settings relies on models that use memory components that were originally developed for tasks like those that occur in natural language processing (NLP), e.g., LSTMs (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) and GRUs (Cho et al., 2014) .
Hausknecht & Stone (2015) first demonstrated benefits of LSTMs in RL tasks designed to test memory, and these and similar approaches have become common in Deep RL (Wang et al., 2016) , including multi-agent RL (Rashid et al., 2018; Foerster et al., 2017) .
In this work, we demonstrate that the characteristics of RL can severely impede learning in memory models that are not specifically designed for RL, and propose new models designed to tackle these challenges.
For example, LSTMs excel in NLP tasks where the order of observations (characters or words) is crucial, and where influence between observations decays quickly with distance.
Contrast this with a hypothetical RL example where an agent must discover a hidden passcode to escape a locked dungeon.
The order of observations is highly dependent on the agent's path through the dungeon, yet when it reaches the door, only its ability to recall the passcode is relevant to escaping the dungeon, irrespective of when the agent observed it and how many observations it has seen since.
Figure 1 illustrates the problem.
Even in the simplified case where stochasticity is introduced by observation noise, the sample efficiency of LSTMs decreases drastically.
We show that this problem occurs not just for LSTMs, but also for stacked LSTMs and DNCs (Graves et al., 2016; Wayne et al., 2018) , which have been widely applied in RL, and propose solutions that address this problem.
(Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997 ) trained on a noise-free (T-L, left) and noisy (T-LN, right) TMaze tasks.
In both cases, the agent must recall a signal from memory.
LSTM completely fails in the noisy setting while AMRL-Max learns rapidly.
(68% confidence interval over 5 runs, as for all plots.)
We make the following three contributions.
First, in Section 3, we introduce our approach, AMRL.
AMRL augments memory models like LSTMs with aggregators that are substantially more robust to noise than previous approaches.
Our models combine several innovations which jointly allow the model to ignore noise while maintaining order-variant information as needed.
Further, AMRL models maintain informative gradients over very long horizons, which is crucial for sample-efficient learning in long-term memory tasks (Pascanu et al., 2012; Bakker, 2001; Wierstra et al., 2009 ).
Second, in Section 5, we systematically evaluate how the sources of noise that affect RL agents affect the sample efficiency of AMRL and baseline approaches.
We devise a series of experiments in two domains, (1) a symbolic maze domain and (2) 3D mazes in the game Minecraft.
Our results show that AMRL can solve long-term memory tasks significantly faster than existing methods.
Across tasks our best model achieves an increase in final average return of 9% over baselines with far more parameters and 19% over LSTMs with the same number of parameters.
Third, in Section 6 we analytically and empirically analyze the characteristics of our proposed and baseline models with the aim to identify factors that affect performance.
We empirically confirm that AMRL models are substantially less susceptible to vanishing gradients than previous models.
We propose to additionally analyze memory models in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio achieved at increasing distances from a given signal, and show that AMRL models can maintain signals over many timesteps.
Jointly, the results of our detailed analysis validate our modeling choices and show why AMRL models are able to effectively solve long-term memory tasks.
The results in the previous section indicate that models that perform well on long-term memory tasks in noisy settings, such as those studied in Section 5, tend to have informative gradients and high SNR over long time horizons.
In this section we further examine this relationship.
Figure 8 shows the aggregate performance achieved by each model across the experiments presented in Section 5 and in the appendix A.2.
We argue that these tasks capture key aspects of long-term memory tasks in noisy settings.
We observe that our proposed AMRL-Avg and AMRL-Max approaches outperform all other methods.
Ablations Max and Avg are competitive with baselines, but our results demonstrate the value of the ST connection.
AMRL-Max improves over the LSTM average return by 19% with no additional parameters and outperforms DNC the average return by 9% with far fewer parameters.
We have shown that AMRL models are not susceptible to the drastic performance decreases in noisy environments that LSTMs and DNCs are susceptible to, and we have shown that this generalizes to an ability to ignore irrelevant features in other tasks.
Figure 8(b) relates overall model performance to the quantities analyzed above, SNR and gradient strength.
We find SNR and gradient strength are both integral and complementary aspects needed for a successful model: DNC has a relatively large SNR, but does not match the empirical performance of AMRL -likely due to its decaying gradients.
AMRL models achieve high SNR and maintain strong gradients, achieving the highest empirical performance.
The reverse holds for LSTM models.
An outlier is the SUM model -we hypothesize that the growing sum creates issues when interpreting memories independent of the time step at which they occur.
The max aggregator may be less susceptible to growing activations given a bounded number of distinct observations, a bounded input activation, or an analogously compact internal representation.
That is, the max value may be low and reached quickly.
Moreover, the ST connection will still prevent gradient decay in such a case.
Overall, our analytical and empirical analysis in terms of SNR and gradient decay both validates our modeling choices in developing AMRL, and provides a useful tool for understanding learning performance of memory models.
By considering both empirical measurements of SNR and gradients we are able to rank models closely in-line with empirical performance.
We consider this a particularly valuable insight for future research seeking to improve long-term memory.
We have demonstrated that the performance of previous approaches to memory in RL can severely deteriorate under noise, including observation noise and noise introduced by an agents policy and environment dynamics.
We proposed AMRL, a novel approach designed specifically to be robust to RL settings, by maintaining strong signal and gradients over time.
Our empirical results confirmed that the proposed models outperform existing approaches, often dramatically.
Finally, by analyzing gradient strength and signal-to-noise ratio of the considered models, we validated our model choices and showed that both aspects help explain the high empirical performance achieved by our models.
In future research, we believe our models and analysis will form the basis of further understanding, and improving performance of memory models in RL.
An aspect that goes beyond the scope of the present paper is the question of how to prevent long-term memory tasks from interfering with shorter-term tasks -an issue highlighted in Appendix A.2.3.
Additionally, integration of AMRL into models other than the standard LSTM could be explored.
Overall, our work highlights the need and potential for approaches that specifically tackle long-term memory tasks from an RL perspective.

assistant: text: In Deep RL, order-invariant functions can be used in conjunction with standard memory modules to improve gradient decay and resilience to noise.