Hindsight Task Relabelling: Experience Replay for Sparse Reward Meta-RL

1 Introduction . Reinforcement learning ( RL ) has seen tremendous success applied to challenging games ( Mnih et al. , 2015 ; Silver et al. , 2017 ) and robotic control ( Lillicrap et al. , 2015 ; Levine et al. , 2016 ) , driven by advances in compute and the use of deep neural networks as powerful function approximators in RL algorithms . However , agents trained using deep RL often struggle to meaningfully utilize past experience to learn new tasks , even if the new tasks differ only slightly from tasks seen during training ( Zhang et al. , 2018 ; Packer et al. , 2018 ; Cobbe et al. , 2019 ) . In contrast , humans are adept at utilizing prior experience to rapidly acquire new skills and adapt to unseen environments . Meta-reinforcement learning ( meta-RL ) aims to address this limitation by extending the RL framework to explicitly consider structured distributions of tasks ( Schmidhuber , 1987 ; Bengio et al. , 1990 ; Thrun & Pratt , 1998 ) . Whereas conventional RL is concerned with learning a single task , meta-RL is concerned with learning to learn , that is , learning how to quickly learn a new task by leveraging prior experience on related tasks . Meta-RL methods generally utilize a limited amount of experience in a new environment to estimate a latent task embedding which conditions the policy , or to compute a policy gradient which is used to directly update the parameters of the policy . A major challenge in both RL and meta-RL is learning with sparse rewards . When rewards are sparse or delayed , the adaptation stage in meta-RL becomes extremely difficult : inferring the task at hand requires receiving reward signal from the environment , which in the sparse reward setting only happens after successfully completing the task . Due to this inherent incompatibility between meta-RL and sparse rewards , existing meta-RL algorithms that consider the sparse reward setting either only work in simple environments that do not require temporally-extended exploration strategies for adaptation ( Duan et al. , 2016 ; Stadie et al. , 2018 ) , or train exclusively using dense reward functions ( Gupta et al. , 2018b ; Rakelly et al. , 2019 ) , which are designed to encourage an agent to learn adaptation strategies that can be directly applied to the original sparse reward setting . 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems ( NeurIPS 2021 ) . In this paper , we show that the concept of hindsight relabeling ( Andrychowicz et al. , 2017 ) from conventional RL can be applied in meta-RL to enable learning to learn in the sparse reward setting . Our key insight is that data collected on the true training tasks can be relabelled as pseudo-expert data for easier hindsight tasks , bootstrapping meta-training with the reward signal needed to train the agent . We introduce a new algorithm for off-policy meta-RL , which we call Hindsight Task Relabeling ( HTR ) , and demonstrate its effectiveness by achieving state-of-the-art performance on a collection of challenging sparse reward environments that previously required shaped reward to solve . Not only is our approach able to learn adaptation strategies only using sparse reward , but it also learns strategies with comparable performance to existing approaches that use shaped reward functions . 2 Related Work . In meta-RL , an agent learns an adaptation strategy by repeatedly adapting to training tasks in the inner loop of meta-training , with the hope that the learned adaptation procedure will generalize to new , unseen tasks during meta-testing . Context-based methods use recent experience ( i.e. , context , in the form of trajectories or transitions ) in a new task to estimate a latent task embedding , and differ mainly in how this embedding is computed : Duan et al . ( 2016 ) ; Wang et al . ( 2016 ) ; Mishra et al . ( 2018 ) propose aggregating context into the hidden state of the policy , whereas Rakelly et al . ( 2019 ) propose explicitly feeding the task embedding as input to the policy . Gradient-based methods use recent context to update differentiable hyperparameters ( Xu et al. , 2018b ) , loss functions ( Sung et al. , 2017 ; Houthooft et al. , 2018 ) , or to directly update policy parameters ( Finn et al. , 2017 ; Stadie et al. , 2018 ; Xu et al. , 2018a ; Zintgraf et al. , 2018 ; Gupta et al. , 2018b ; Rothfuss et al. , 2019 ) . Many of the aforementioned approaches struggle to learn effective exploration strategies for tasks with sparse or delayed rewards . Methods that directly update the policy either implicitly ( e.g. , with a hidden state ) or explicitly ( e.g. , with gradients ) are generally unable to learn a policy that meaningfully explores , since the primary source of randomness is action-space , and thus is time-invariant . Gupta et al . ( 2018b ) and Rakelly et al . ( 2019 ) propose using a probabilistic task variable that is sampled once per episode , which makes the primary source of variability task-dependent and enables temporallyextended exploration . While this approach enables effective adaptation in the sparse reward setting , both Gupta et al . ( 2018b ) and Rakelly et al . ( 2019 ) learn the actual adaptation strategies using shaped ( dense ) reward functions during meta-training . In the environments they consider , the adaptation strategies learned using dense rewards generalize to sparse rewards despite the difference in reward structure ; however , engineering a suitable reward function can be costly ( Ng et al. , 1999 ) and error prone ( Clark & Amodei , 2016 ) , and thus it is highly desirable to devise a mechanism for learning to learn in the sparse reward setting that does not require an auxiliary dense reward function . Our proposed method is closely related to prior work in unsupervised meta-RL and goal generation . Unsupervised meta-RL ( Jabri et al. , 2019 ; Gupta et al. , 2018a ) considers the meta-RL setting without access to a training task distribution ; training tasks are instead self-generated with the aim of learning skills useful for the test task distribution . Our proposed method also generates a curriculum of training tasks , but with the intent of learning adaptation strategies in the sparse reward setting , as opposed to learning transferable skills in a setting with no rewards at all . Several methods exist for curriculum generation in the context of goal-conditioned policies , including adversarial goal generation ( Florensa et al. , 2018 ) and goal relabeling ( Kaelbling , 1993 ; Andrychowicz et al. , 2017 ; Levy et al. , 2017 ; Nair et al. , 2018 ) . Recent work ( Li et al. , 2020 ; Eysenbach et al. , 2020 ) has proposed the use of inverse RL to generalize goal relabeling to broader families of tasks . Unlike prior work on goal and task relabeling that use goal- or task-conditioned policies , we focus on the meta-RL setting where the task is unknown to the policy and must be inferred through deliberate and coherent exploration . 3 Background . In this section we formalize the meta-RL problem setting and briefly describe two algorithms which our approach , Hindsight Task Relabeling , builds on : Probabilistic Embeddings for Actor-critic RL ( PEARL ) and Hindsight Experience Replay ( HER ) . 3.1 Meta-Reinforcement Learning ( Meta-RL ) . Conventional RL assumes environments are modeled by a Markov Decision Processes ( MDP ) M , defined by the tuple ( S , A , p , r , γ , ρ0 , T ) where S is the set of possible states , A is the set of actions , p : S×A×S → R≥0 is the transition probability density , r : S×A → R is the reward function , γ is the discount factor , ρ0 : S → R≥0 is the initial state distribution at the beginning of each episode , and T is the time horizon of an episode ( Sutton & Barto , 2017 ) . Let st and at be the state and action taken at time t. At the beginning of each episode , s0 ∼ ρ0 ( · ) . Under a stochastic policy π mapping a sequence of states to actions , at ∼ π ( at | st , · · · , s0 ) and st+1 ∼ p ( st+1 | st , at ) , generating a trajectory τ = { st , at , r ( st , at ) } , where t = 0 , 1 , · · · . Conventional RL algorithms , which assume the environment is fixed , learn π to maximize the expected reward per episode JM ( π ) = Eπ [ ∑T t=0 γ trt ] , where rt = r ( st , at ) . They often utilize the concepts of a value function V πM ( s ) , the expected reward conditional on s0 = s and a state-action value function QπM ( s , a ) , the expected reward conditional on s0 = s and a0 = a. Meta-RL algorithms assume that there is a distribution of tasks p ( T ) , and usually maximize the expected reward over the distribution , EπT ∼p ( T ) [ JT ( π ) ] . The distribution of tasks corresponds to a distribution of MDPs M ( T ) , where T can paramaterize an MDP ’ s dynamics or reward . In this work we focus on the latter case , where each T implies an MDP with a different reward function under the same dynamics . The agent is trained on a set of training tasks Ttrain ∼ p ( T ) during meta-training , and evaluated on a held-out set of testing tasks Ttest ∼ p ( T ) during meta-testing . An important distinction between meta-RL and multi-task or goal-conditioned RL is that in meta-RL , the task is never explicitly revealed to the agent or policy π through observations s. Instead , π must explore the environment to infer the task to maximize expected reward . This crucial difference is one reason why Hindsight Experience Replay can not be directly applied to the meta-RL setting . 3.2 Off-Policy Meta-Reinforcement Learning . We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by building on top of Probabilistic Embeddings for Actor-critic RL ( PEARL ) by Rakelly et al . ( 2019 ) , an off-policy meta-RL algorithm which itself is built on top of soft actor-critic ( SAC ) by Haarnoja et al . ( 2018 ) . SAC is an actor-critic algorithm based on the maximum entropy RL objective that optimizes a stochastic policy π with off-policy data . In addition to the policy ( actor ) π , SAC concurrently learns twin state-action value functions ( critics ) Q. Transitions collected using the policy π are added to the replay buffer B , and Q and π are optimized using loss functions regularized by the entropy of π. Rakelly et al . ( 2019 ) extend SAC to the meta-RL setting by adding a context encoder that uses recent history in an environment to estimate a task embedding , which is then utilized by the policy . Specifically , PEARL uses a network qφ ( z | c ) that takes as input recently collected data ( i.e. , context c ) to infer a probabilistic latent context variable Z . Samples from the latent context variable condition the actor , πθ ( a | s , z ) , and critic , Qθ ( s , a , z ) . Instead of a single replay buffer ( as in SAC ) , there are T separate buffers Bi=1 ... T , corresponding to the number of tasks sampled for Ttrain . The separate per-task replay buffers enable sampling off-policy ( but on-task ) context during the inner loop of meta-training , which significantly improves data efficiency . During meta-training , transitions are collected for each Bi by sampling z ∼ qφ ( z | c ) and acting according to πθ ( a | s , z ) . z is periodically sampled during data collection such that the context contains transitions collected using the policy conditioned on the prior , as well the same policy conditioned on the posterior . Gradients used to optimize qφ , πθ and Qθ are computed in task-specific batches across a random subset of training tasks Ti ∼ p ( T ) , each with an associated replay buffer Bi . During meta-testing , for each test task Ti ∼ p ( T ) , an empty buffer Bi is initialized , z is sampled from the prior , and the policy conditioned on z is rolled out . As additional context is added to the replay buffer , the belief over z narrows , enabling the policy to adapt to the task at hand .

Summary: This paper extends the idea of hindsight experience replay (HER) to a meta reinforcement learning setup. The primary focus is on sparse reward settings, where it is difficult for HER to generalize and even harder to conceptualize and optimize in the meta RL setting.   This paper provides a simple learning algorithm to relabel experiences in an off policy learning settings and provides experimental validation on continuous control tasks.  Key idea: the task is unknown in the meta RL setting. An arbitrary experience trajectory collected during policy evaluation (unknown task) can be reused for an artifically induced task (therefore known). This lets the algorithm leverage past experiences under unknown task distributions to meta learn strategies for an unknown task with sparse rewards.