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Title: Reward Constrained Policy Optimization

Paper content:
Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat.
As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior.
While constraints may solve this issue, there is no closed form solution for general constraints.
In this work we present a novel multi-timescale approach for constrained policy optimization, called `Reward Constrained Policy Optimization' (RCPO), which uses an alternative penalty signal to guide the policy towards a constraint satisfying one.
We prove the convergence of our approach and provide empirical evidence of its ability to train constraint satisfying policies.
Applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) is generally a hard problem.
At each state, the agent performs an action which produces a reward.
The goal is to maximize the accumulated reward, hence the reward signal implicitly defines the behavior of the agent.
While in computer games (e.g. BID2 ) there exists a pre-defined reward signal, it is not such in many real applications.An example is the Mujoco domain BID33 , in which the goal is to learn to control robotic agents in tasks such as: standing up, walking, navigation and more.
Considering the Humanoid domain, the agent is a 3 dimensional humanoid and the task is to walk forward as far as possible (without falling down) within a fixed amount of time.
Naturally, a reward is provided based on the forward velocity in order to encourage a larger distance; however, additional reward signals are provided in order to guide the agent, for instance a bonus for staying alive, a penalty for energy usage and a penalty based on the force of impact between the feet and the floor (which should encourage less erratic behavior).
Each signal is multiplied by it's own coefficient, which controls the emphasis placed on it.This approach is a multi-objective problem BID20 ; in which for each set of penalty coefficients, there exists a different, optimal solution, also known as Pareto optimality BID34 .
In practice, the exact coefficient is selected through a time consuming and a computationally intensive process of hyper-parameter tuning.
As our experiments show, the coefficient is not shared across domains, a coefficient which leads to a satisfying behavior on one domain may lead to catastrophic failure on the other (issues also seen in BID17 and BID19 ).
Constraints are a natural and consistent approach, an approach which ensures a satisfying behavior without the need for manually selecting the penalty coefficients.In constrained optimization, the task is to maximize a target function f (x) while satisfying an inequality constraint g(x) ≤ α.
While constraints are a promising solution to ensuring a satisfying behavior, existing methods are limited in the type of constraints they are able to handle and the algorithms that they may support -they require a parametrization of the policy (policy gradient methods) and propagation of the constraint violation signal over the entire trajectory (e.g. BID26 ).
This poses an issue, as Q-learning algorithms such as DQN BID21 do not learn a parametrization of the policy, and common Actor-Critic methods (e.g. BID27 BID22 BID0 Reward shaping BID29 3 BID29 ) build the reward-to-go based on an N-step sample and a bootstrap update from the critic.In this paper, we propose the 'Reward Constrained Policy Optimization' (RCPO) algorithm.
RCPO incorporates the constraint as a penalty signal into the reward function.
This penalty signal guides the policy towards a constraint satisfying solution.
We prove that RCPO converges almost surely, under mild assumptions, to a constraint satisfying solution (Theorem 2).
In addition; we show, empirically on a toy domain and six robotics domains, that RCPO results in a constraint satisfying solution while demonstrating faster convergence and improved stability (compared to the standard constraint optimization methods).Related
work: Constrained Markov Decision Processes BID1 are an active field of research. CMDP applications
cover a vast number of topics, such as: electric grids BID14 , networking BID11 , robotics BID8 BID10 BID0 BID9 and finance BID15 BID32 .The main approaches
to solving such problems are (i) Lagrange multipliers
BID5 BID4 , (ii) Trust Region BID0 ,
(iii) integrating prior
knowledge BID9 and (iv) manual selection of
the penalty coefficient BID31 BID18 BID25 .

assistant: text: For complex constraints in which it is not easy to estimate the gradient, we use the discounted penalty as a guiding signal. We prove that under certain assumptions it converges to a feasible solution.