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Title: Recall Traces: Backtracking Models for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
In many environments only a tiny subset of all states yield high reward.
In these cases, few of the interactions with the environment provide a relevant learning signal.
Hence, we may want to preferentially train on those high-reward states and the probable trajectories leading to them.
To this end, we advocate for the use of a \textit{backtracking model} that predicts the preceding states that terminate at a given high-reward state.
We can train a model which, starting from a high value state (or one that is estimated to have high value), predicts and samples which (state, action)-tuples may have led to that high value state.
These traces of (state, action) pairs, which we refer to as Recall Traces, sampled from this backtracking model starting from a high value state, are informative as they terminate in good states, and hence we can use these traces to improve a policy.
We provide a variational interpretation for this idea and a practical algorithm in which the backtracking model samples from an approximate posterior distribution over trajectories which lead to large rewards.
Our method improves the sample efficiency of both on- and off-policy RL algorithms across several environments and tasks.
Training control algorithms efficiently from interactions with the environment is a central issue in reinforcement learning (RL).
Model-free RL methods, combined with deep neural networks, have achieved impressive results across a wide range of domains BID18 BID39 .
However, existing model-free solutions lack sample efficiency, meaning that they require extensive interaction with the environment to achieve these levels of performance.Model-based methods in RL can mitigate this issue.
These approaches learn an unsupervised model of the underlying dynamics of the environment, which does not necessarily require rewards, as the model observes and predicts state-to-state transitions.
With a well-trained model, the algorithm can then simulate the environment and look ahead to future events to establish better value estimates, without requiring expensive interactions with the environment.
Model-based methods can thus be more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts, but often do not achieve the same asymptotic performance BID6 BID28 .In
this work, we propose a method that takes advantage of unsupervised observations of state-to-state transitions for increasing the sample efficiency of current model-free RL algorithms, as measured by the number of interactions with the environment required to learn a successful policy. Our
idea stems from a simple observation: given a world model, finding a path between a starting state and a goal state can be done either forward from the start or backward from the goal. Here
, we explore an idea for leveraging the latter approach and combining it with model-free algorithms. This
idea is particularly useful when rewards are sparse. High-value
states are rare and trajectories leading to them are particularly useful for a learner.The availability of an exact backward dynamics model of the environment is a strong and often unrealistic requirement for most domains. Therefore,
we propose learning a backward dynamics model, which we refer to as a backtracking model, from the experiences performed by the agent. This backtracking
model p(s t , a t |s t+1 ), is trained to predict, given a state s t+1 , which state s t the agent visited before s t+1 and what action a t ∼ π was performed in s t to reach s t+1 . Specifically, this
is a model which, starting from a future high-value state, can be used to recall traces that have ended at this high value state, that is sequences of (state, action)-tuples. This allows the agent
to simulate and be exposed to alternative possible paths to reach a high value state. A final state may be
a previously experienced high-value state or a goal state may be explicitly given, or even produced by the agent using a generative model of high-value states BID19 . Our hypothesis is that
using a backtracking model in this way should benefit learning, especially in the context of weak or sparse rewards. Indeed, in environments
or tasks where the agent receives rewards infrequently, it must leverage this information effectively and efficiently. Exploration methods have
been employed successfully BID2 BID19 BID32 to increase the frequency at which novel states are discovered. Our proposal can be viewed
as a special kind of simulated exploration proceeding backward from presumed high-value states, in order to discover trajectories that may lead to high rewards. A backtracking model aims
to augment the experience of the trajectory τ leading to a high-value state by generating other possible tracesτ that could have also caused it. To summarize: the main contribution
of this paper is an RL method based on the use of a backtracking model, which can easily be integrated with existing on-and off-policy techniques for reducing sample complexity. Empirically, we show with experiments
on eight RL environments that the proposed approach is more sample efficient.
We advocate for the use of a backtracking model for improving sample efficiency and exploration in RL.
The method can easily be combined with popular RL algorithms like TRPO and soft actorcritic.
Our results indicate that the recall traces generated by such models are able to accelerate learning on a variety of tasks.
We also show that the method can be combined with automatic goal generation.
The Appendix provides more analysis on the sensitivity of our method to various factors and ablations.
We show that a random model is outperformed by a trained backtracking model, confirming its usefulness and present plots showing the effect of varying the length of recall traces.For future work, while we observed empirically that the method has practical value and could relate its workings from a variational perspective, but more could be done to improve our theoretical understanding of its convergence behavior and what kind of assumptions need to hold about the environment.
It would also be interesting to investigate how the backtracking model can be combined with forward models from a more conventional model-based system.
Return argmax(V (s)) ∀s ∈ B 7: end if

assistant: text: A backward model of previous (state, action) given the next state, i.e. P(s_t, a_t | s_{t+1}), can be used to simulate additional trajectories terminating at states of interest! Improves RL learning efficiency.