Paper:
Randomized Prior Functions for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Dealing with uncertainty is essential for e cient reinforcement learning. There is a growing literature on uncertainty estimation for deep learning from fixed datasets, but many of the most popular approaches are poorlysuited to sequential decision problems. Other methods, such as bootstrap sampling, have no mechanism for uncertainty that does not come from the observed data. We highlight why this can be a crucial shortcoming and propose a simple remedy through addition of a randomized untrainable 'prior' network to each ensemble member. We prove that this approach is e cient with linear representations, provide simple illustrations of its e cacy with nonlinear representations and show that this approach scales to large-scale problems far better than previous attempts.

Review:
Summary: This paper studies RL exploration based on uncertainty. First, they compare several previously published RL exploration methods and identifying their drawbacks (including illustrative toy experiments). Then, they extend a particular previous method, bootstrapped DQN [1] (which uses bootstrap uncertainty estimates), through the addition of random prior functions. This extension is motivated from Bayesian linear regression, and transferred to the case of deep non-linear neural networks. Experimental results on the Chain, CartPole swing-up and Montezuma Revenge show improved performance over a previous baseline, the bootstrapped DQN method.   Strength:  See conclusion.  Comments: - Lemma 2: The lack of uncertainty propagation in standard supervised learning methods is an important point indeed. However, you specifically introduce it as a problem of variational inference, while I think it is a problem that applies to all uncertainty methods from supervised learning used in RL, when their output distribution and loss only concern a mean. The problem indeed is that one needs to explicitly learn/propagate entire distributions or higher-order moments, i.e. specifying additional network outputs apart from the mean, as you mention in the appendix (lines 527-529). I think [5] is an early reference that identified this problem.  I don’t think the bootstrap method used in this paper is robust against this problem either actually. If I sample many 1-step bootstrap predictions for a particular state-action pair (and do sample the uncertainty at the next state), then for many samples the bootstrap datasets will become similar, and the entire ensemble starts to fit the same model (uncertainty becoming zero). This is because the loss in bootstrapped DQN still only considers/learns the mean of the distribution which you sample from.  - Figure 2: Why is the posterior over x^t*theta almost only varying in the x1 direction? The observed datapoints seem to have equal amount of spread in both the x1 and x2 dimensions. - Lemma 3: This is a key step in your method. I would prefer a derivation of both eq 4 and 5 in the appendix, showing how they lead to the posterior of eq 3.  - Line 196: At first it appeared strange to me that the random prior is fixed throughout learning, as for example many previous approaches resample parameter space noise [4] at the beginning of every episode. It might be good to identify that this choice does follow from Lemma 3, i.e. for each sample \tilde{theta} from the prior you get a sample from the posterior, and each bootstrap network covers one such sample from the posterior.  - Section 4.1: Are the prior networks also Glorot initialized (and then rescaled by beta)? Or what other distribution do you draw these from?  - Appendix B&C: (Chain results) I do not understand what parameter p denotes here. In Lemma 1 and Figure 12, it is the dropout probability. Line 608-609 mentions it as well? - Line 270: … and the continuous action space? - Figure 6: You seem to tune hyperparameters for your BSP, but not for the BS method? I think it would also be good to state how you compare to other directed exploration methods on Montezuma, e.g. [2,3] come to 3500 and 3000 score, respectively (which your best result is close to).  Appendix: - Lemma 5: I think this needs a proof/derivation of the lemma?  - Line 584: ‘where the data has target value zero, bootstrapping will always produce a zero target’ - - > Is this really true? The bootstrapping procedure is oblivious of the numeric range of the data right? I wonder whether the effect in Figure 9 would also be visible if your left 9 datapoints had y=1 instead of y=0. I think what you are looking at here is the extrapolation of a line when all measured datapoints nearby have the same y. It turns out that naive bootstrap methods then apparently have problems, but I don’t think this has to do with the fact that the y values are specifically 0. (This specific example is still relevant, as in sparse reward domains you will indeed see many returns of 0.) - Table 1: I think it would help to caption the column items, as some of these names were not explicitly mentioned in the text. For example, ‘learned metric’ at first confused me, but checking the crosses and reading back it probably refers to the discongriuity between new states and value uncertainty. -Table 1: ‘multi-step’ means whether uncertainty is propagated? I don’t think that is explicitly done for ensemble/bootstrap methods either right? Or do you mean that you sample your next state prediction Q(s’,a’) from the bootstrap ensemble distribution? But that does not prevent premature convergence of uncertainty, as the bootstrap distribution will still be fitting the mean.  - Appendix B: ‘Algorithm 14’ - - > numbering mistake?  Conclusion: At first, the proposed modification of random prior functions appeared simple, reminding of random parameter space noise. However, it is more involved and has a deeper theoretical motivation from Bayesian linear regression, and turns out to clearly work better than previous bootstrap ensemble methods in RL. Moreover, I really like the effort in Section 2 and Appendix A to systematically discuss previous attempts with respect to uncertainty in RL (although I think the lack of uncertainty propagation identified for varimethods is actually still present in the current paper). I think the paper could be clarified at a few points (as mentioned in the comments above), such as a derivation of Lemma 3 which is a key step in the paper, and the experimental section could mention results of other methods than the bootstrap DQN paper only. Overall, the paper contributes interesting insights and a novel, simple extension to the statistical bootstrap, which actually would be of interest to NIPS attendees outside RL (e.g., from Bayesian deep learning) as well.   [1] Osband, Ian, et al. "Deep exploration via bootstrapped DQN." Advances in neural information processing systems. 2016. [2] Bellemare, Marc, et al. "Unifying count-based exploration and intrinsic motivation." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 2016. [3] Ostrovski, Georg, et al. "Count-Based Exploration with Neural Density Models." International Conference on Machine Learning. 2017. [4] Plappert, Matthias, et al. "Parameter space noise for exploration." arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.01905 (2017). [5] Dearden, Richard, Nir Friedman, and Stuart Russell. "Bayesian Q-learning." AAAI/IAAI. 1998.  After rebuttal: The authors elaborated on how their approach does propagate uncertainty, since each bootstrap network only uses itself as a target. I agree that this will propagate uncertainty. I think it is crucial to stress this aspect of their method, around Lemma 2 and probably somewhere in the introduction or discussion, as the authors indicate themselves in the rebuttal as well.