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Title: Stabilizing Transformers for Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
Owing to their ability to both effectively integrate information over long time horizons and scale to massive amounts of data, self-attention architectures have recently shown breakthrough success in natural language processing (NLP), achieving state-of-the-art results in domains such as language modeling and machine translation.
Harnessing the transformer's ability to process long time horizons of information could provide a similar performance boost in partially-observable reinforcement learning (RL) domains, but the large-scale transformers used in NLP have yet to be successfully applied to the RL setting.
In this work we demonstrate that the standard transformer architecture is difficult to optimize, which was previously observed in the supervised learning setting but becomes especially pronounced with RL objectives.
We propose architectural modifications that substantially improve the stability and learning speed of the original Transformer and XL variant.
The proposed architecture, the Gated Transformer-XL (GTrXL), surpasses LSTMs on challenging memory environments and achieves state-of-the-art results on the multi-task DMLab-30 benchmark suite, exceeding the performance of an external memory architecture.
We show that the GTrXL, trained using the same losses, has stability and performance that consistently matches or exceeds a competitive LSTM baseline, including on more reactive tasks where memory is less critical.
GTrXL offers an easy-to-train, simple-to-implement but substantially more expressive architectural alternative to the standard multi-layer LSTM ubiquitously used for RL agents in partially-observable environments.
It has been argued that self-attention architectures (Vaswani et al., 2017) deal better with longer temporal horizons than recurrent neural networks (RNNs): by construction, they avoid compressing the whole past into a fixed-size hidden state and they do not suffer from vanishing or exploding gradients in the same way as RNNs.
Recent work has empirically validated these claims, demonstrating that self-attention architectures can provide significant gains in performance over the more traditional recurrent architectures such as the LSTM Radford et al., 2019; Devlin et al., 2019; .
In particular, the Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) has had breakthrough success in a wide variety of domains: language modeling Radford et al., 2019; , machine translation (Vaswani et al., 2017; Edunov et al., 2018) , summarization (Liu & Lapata) , question answering (Dehghani et al., 2018; , multi-task representation learning for NLP (Devlin et al., 2019; Radford et al., 2019; , and algorithmic tasks (Dehghani et al., 2018) .
The repeated success of the transformer architecture in domains where sequential information processing is critical to performance makes it an ideal candidate for partially observable RL problems, where episodes can extend to thousands of steps and the critical observations for any decision often span the entire episode.
Yet, the RL literature is dominated by the use of LSTMs as the main mechanism for providing memory to the agent Kapturowski et al., 2019; Mnih et al., 2016) .
Despite progress at designing more expressive memory architectures Wayne et al., 2018; that perform better than LSTMs in memory-based tasks and partially-observable environments, they have not seen widespread adoption in RL agents perhaps due to their complex implementation, with the LSTM being seen as the go-to solution for environments where memory is required.
In contrast to these other memory architectures, the transformer is well-tested in many challenging domains and has seen several open-source implementations in a variety of deep learning frameworks 1 .
Motivated by the transformer's superior performance over LSTMs and the widespread availability of implementations, in this work we investigate the transformer architecture in the RL setting.
In particular, we find that the canonical transformer is significantly difficult to optimize, often resulting in performance comparable to a random policy.
This difficulty in training transformers exists in the supervised case as well.
Typically a complex learning rate schedule is required (e.g., linear warmup or cosine decay) in order to train (Vaswani et al., 2017; , or specialized weight initialization schemes are used to improve performance (Radford et al., 2019) .
These measures do not seem to be sufficient for RL.
In Mishra et al. (2018) , for example, transformers could not solve even simple bandit tasks and tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), leading the authors to hypothesize that the transformer architecture was not suitable for processing sequential information.
However in this work we succeed in stabilizing training with a reordering of the layer normalization coupled with the addition of a new gating mechanism to key points in the submodules of the transformer.
Our novel gated architecture, the Gated Transformer-XL (GTrXL) (shown in Figure 1 , Right), is able to learn much faster and more reliably and exhibit significantly better final performance than the canonical transformer.
We further demonstrate that the GTrXL achieves state-ofthe-art results when compared to the external memory architecture MERLIN (Wayne et al., 2018) on the multitask DMLab-30 suite (Beattie et al., 2016) .
Additionally, we surpass LSTMs significantly on memory-based DMLab-30 levels while matching performance on the reactive set, as well as significantly outperforming LSTMs on memory-based continuous control and navigation environments.
We perform extensive ablations on the GTrXL in challenging environments with both continuous actions and high-dimensional observations, testing the final performance of the various components as well as the GTrXL's robustness to seed and hyperparameter sensitivity compared to LSTMs and the canonical transformer.
We demonstrate a consistent superior performance while matching the stability of LSTMs, providing evidence that the GTrXL architecture can function as a drop-in replacement to the LSTM networks ubiquitously used in RL.
In this paper we provided evidence that confirms previous observations in the literature that standard transformer models are unstable to train in the RL setting and often fail to learn completely (Mishra et al., 2018) .
We presented a new architectural variant of the transformer model, the GTrXL, which has increased performance, more stable optimization, and greater robustness to initial seed and hyperparameters than the canonical architecture.
The key contributions of the GTrXL are reordered layer normalization modules and a gating layer instead of the standard residual connection.
We performed extensive ablation experiments testing the robustness, ease of optimization and final performance of the gating layer variations, as well as the effect of the reordered layer normalization.
These results empirically demonstrate that the GRU-type gating performs best across all metrics, exhibiting comparable robustness to hyperparameters and random seeds as an LSTM while still maintaining a performance improvement.
Furthermore, the GTrXL (GRU) learns faster, more stably and achieves a higher final performance (even when controlled for parameters) than the other gating variants on the challenging multitask DMLab-30 benchmark suite.
Having demonstrated substantial and consistent improvement in DMLab-30, Numpad and Memory Maze over the ubiquitous LSTM architectures currently in use, the GTrXL makes the case for wider adoption of transformers in RL.
A core benefit of the transformer architecture is its ability to scale to very large and deep models, and to effectively utilize this additional capacity in larger datasets.
In future work, we hope to test the limits of the GTrXL's ability to scale in the RL setting by providing it with a large and varied set of training environments.

assistant: text: We succeed in stabilizing transformers for training in the RL setting and demonstrate a large improvement over LSTMs on DMLab-30, matching an external memory architecture.