U NDERSTANDING AND P REVENTING C APACITY L OSS IN R EINFORCEMENT L EARNING
Anonymous authors
Paper under double-blind review
A BSTRACT
The reinforcement learning
RL) problem is rife with sources of non-stationarity that can destabilize or inhibit learning progress
We identify a key mechanism by which this occurs in agents using neural networks as function approximators: capacity loss , whereby networks trained to predict a sequence of target values lose their ability to quickly ﬁt new functions over time.
We demonstrate that capacity loss occurs in a broad range of RL agents and environments, and is particularly damaging to learning progress in sparse-reward tasks.
We then present a simple regularizer, Initial Feature Regularization (InFeR that mitigates this phenomenon by regressing a subspace of features towards its value at initialization, improving performance over a state-of-the-art model-free algorithm in the Atari 2600 suite.
Finally, we study how this regularization affects different notions of capacity and evaluate other mechanisms by which it may improve performance.
I NTRODUCTION
Deep reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable successes in a variety of environments (Mnih et al., 2015;
Moravˇc´ık et al., 2017; Silver et al., 2017; Abreu et al., 2019), but the precise reasons for its successes largely remain mysterious.
Existing algorithms are highly sensitive to hyperparameters and seemingly innocuous design choices, to the extent that even minor variations to state-of-the-art methods can fail to make learning progress on tasks originally solved with ease.
These instabilities are particularly pronounced in sparse-reward environments, where even different random seeds of the same algorithm can attain dramatically different performance outcomes.
In these settings, even if the agent has experienced the rewards necessary to learn a high-scoring policy, it will often fail to translate those rewards into successful policy improvements.
This presents a stark contrast to supervised learning, where existing approaches are reasonably robust to small hyperparameter changes, random seeds, and GPU parallelisation libraries.
Moreover, naive applications of supervised learning methods such as momentum-based optimization or data augmentation to the RL problem have produced mixed results, and often require additional modiﬁcation to yield performance improvements (Bengio et al., 2020; Raileanu et al., 2020).
We hypothesize that the non-stationary prediction problems agents face in RL may be a driving force in the challenges described above.
RL agents must solve a sequence of similar prediction problems as they iteratively improve their prediction accuracy and their policy (Dabney et al., 2021), and solving each subproblem in this sequence is necessary to progress to the next subproblem.
As shown in work on active learning, warm-starting a network by ﬁtting similar data to that used in the downstream task can hurt the network’s ﬁnal accuracy, even if this data is drawn from the same distribution (Ash & Adams, 2020).
This suggests that the slowly-shifting input and target distributions
RL agents face may be particularly ill-suited to function approximation by deep neural networks.
Indeed, several prior works studying the effect of re-initializing network parameters in reinforcement learning have found this enables agents to break through plateaus and improve generalization performance (Igl et al., 2021; Fedus et al., 2020).
The principal thesis of this paper is that over the course of training, deep RL agents lose some of their capacity to quickly ﬁt new prediction tasks, and in extreme cases this capacity loss prevents the agent entirely from making learning progress.
We present a rigorous empirical analysis of this phenomenon which considers both the ability of networks to learn new target functions via gradientbased optimization methods, and their ability to linearly disentangle states’ feature representations.
We conﬁrm that agents’ ability to ﬁt new target functions declines over the course of training in several environments from the Atari suite (Bellemare et al., 2013) and non-stationary reward prediction tasks.
We further ﬁnd that the ability of representations to linearly distinguish different states, a proxy for their ability to represent certain functions, quickly diminishes in sparse-reward games, leading to representation collapse, where the feature outputs for every state in the environment inhabit a low-dimensional – or possibly even zero – subspace.
Finally, we show evidence that representation collapse is a key factor in agents’ failure to make learning progress in sparse-reward environments.
We then propose a simple regularization technique, Initial Feature Regularization (InFeR), to prevent representation collapse: regress a set of feature projection heads to their values at initialization.
This method improves performance on a number of sparse-reward environments and also increases the measures of capacity we are interested in, preventing representation collapse in sparse-reward environments and improving target-ﬁtting capacity in dense-reward environments.
One striking take-away from our results is that agents trained on so-called ‘hard exploration’ games such as Montezuma’s Revenge can attain signiﬁcant improvements over existing competitive baselines without using smart exploration algorithms.
This suggests that the poor performance of deep
RL agents in sparse-reward environments is not solely due to inadequate exploration, but rather also in part due to poor representation learning.
Essentially, agents which are ‘too good’ at predicting the zero value function lose their ability to ﬁt the non-zero targets necessary for policy improvement.
We believe this has signiﬁcant implications for how the community views the interplay of exploration and representation learning in sparse reward environments.
B ACKGROUND
We consider the reinforcement learning problem wherein an agent seeks to maximize expected return in an MDP M =
( X , A , R, P ,  ) , where X denotes the state space, A the action space, R the reward function,
P the transition probability function, and  the discount factor.
We will be primarily interested in value-based RL, where the objective is to learn the value function
Q ⇡ : X ⇥ A !
R associated with some (possibly stochastic) policy ⇡ : X !
P ( A ) , deﬁned as Q ⇡ ( x, a ) =
E ⇡ ,
P
[Equation] [Equation]
[Equation]
a ] .
In particular, we are interested in learning the value function associated with the optimal policy ⇡ ⇤ which maximizes the expected discounted sum of rewards from any state.
In Q-Learning (Watkins & Dayan, 1992), the agent performs updates to minimize the distance between a predicted action-value function Q and the bootstrap target deﬁned as
[Equation]
In most practical settings, updates are performed with respect to sampled transitions rather than on the entire state space.
The target can be computed for a sampled transition ( x t , a t , r t , x t +1 ) as ˆ
T Q
[Equation]
[Equation] When a deep neural network is used as a function approximator (the deep RL setting), Q is deﬁned to be the output of a neural network with parameters ✓ , and updates are performed by gradient descent on sampled transitions ⌧ = ( x t , a t , r t , x t +1 ) .
A number of tricks are often used to improve stability: the sample-based objective is minimized following stochastic gradient descent based on minibatches sampled from a replay buffer of stored transitions, and a separate set of parameters ¯ ✓ is used to compute the targets Q ¯ ✓ ( x t +1 , a t +1 ) which is typically updated more slowly than the network’s online parameters.
This yields the following loss function (where ⌧ denotes the sampled transition):
[Equation]
In this work we will be interested in how additional representation-learning objectives shape agents’ learning dynamics.
We will refer to the outputs of the ﬁnal hidden layer of the network (i.e. the penultimate layer) as features , denoted  ✓ ( x ) .
Our choice of the penultimate layer is motivated by prior literature studying representations in RL (Ghosh & Bellemare, 2020; Kumar et al., 2021), although many works studying representation learning consider the outputs of earlier layers as well.
In general, the features of a neural network are deﬁned to be the outputs of whatever layer is used to compute additional representation learning objectives.
C APACITY L OSS
In this section we demonstrate conditions under which neural networks progressively lose their ability to quickly ﬁt new targets when trained on sequences of prediction tasks including but not limited to those found in value-based RL.
We ﬁnd that capacity loss is particularly pronounced in sparse prediction tasks, where many of the target values the agent seeks to predict are zero.
To study the effect of extreme capacity loss on performance in greater depth, we present a special case of the target-ﬁtting capacity measure which is efﬁcient to compute and has the intuitive interpretation of measuring the ability of the representation to linearly disentangle states.
We ﬁnd evidence that agents which have greater capacity according to this metric tend to achieve better performance in challenging environments from the Atari suite where agents fail to match human performance, and that those suffering from representation collapse according to this metric fail to make any learning progress at all.
3. T ARGET - FITTING CAPACITY
Neural networks trained with temporal difference learning objectives must solve a sequence of target prediction problems.
Ideally, the network should be able to ﬁt later targets as quickly and accurately as it is able to ﬁt early targets.
However, prior work suggests that using ‘warm starts’, i.e. weights from a network trained on a different dataset or target function, can slow down training on new data points (Ash & Adams, 2020).
We are therefore interested in studying whether this notion of interference may affect the ability of reinforcement learning agents to make learning progress.
We begin by formally deﬁning a notion of capacity loss which measures whether the network can quickly ﬁt new targets, for example after a policy improvement step increases the expected reward obtained in a given state or after the target network is updated.
Deﬁnition 1 (Target-ﬁtting capacity) .
Let P X 2 P ( X ) be some distribution over inputs X and
P F a distribution over a family of functions F with domain X .
Let N =
( g ✓ , ✓ 0 ) represent the pairing of a neural network architecture with some initial parameters ✓ 0 , and O correspond to an optimization algorithm for supervised learning.
We measure the capacity of N under the optimizer
O to ﬁt the data-generating distribution D =
( P X , P F ) as follows:
[Equation]
where ✓
[Equation] = [Equation] This deﬁnition of capacity takes into account the interaction between the optimization algorithm and the initial parameters, and can be adapted to a broad range of function classes such as the network’s TD targets on the current dataset, the reward function on the environment, or randomly generated functions.
The choice of function class is crucial to the notion of capacity measured.
Using bootstrap targets from the network’s current parameters can identify networks which cannot ﬁt their current target function, but may reveal more about the complexity of the network output than the network’s capacity to ﬁt novel targets.
A network which can only output the zero function, for example, will attain very low Bellman error in a sparse-reward environment, but may not be able to ﬁt more interesting value functions.
In our evaluations, we will therefore consider a random class of functions which is independent of the current network parameters.
To evaluate target-ﬁtting capacity in deep RL agents, we sample target functions by randomly initializing neural networks with new parameters, and use the outputs of these networks as targets for regression.
We then load initial parameters from an agent checkpoint at some time t , and regress on random network outputs over a ﬁxed set of inputs sampled from the earliest available checkpoint’s replay buffer.
This ensures that the same regression problem is being evaluated at every checkpoint.
We then evaluate the mean squared error after training for ﬁfty thousand steps.
We observe that as training progresses agents’ checkpoints on average get modestly worse at ﬁtting these random targets in most environments; due to space limitations we only show two representative environments where this phenomenon occurs in Figure 1, and defer the full evaluation to Appendix C. While the resulting curves are relatively noisy, we do see consistent results across both the double DQN agent and the agent trained with an additional auxiliary loss.
We now turn our attention to a less computationally expensive experimental setting where it is easier to obtain statistically robust results.
We are particularly interested in understanding why capacity loss occurs.
Two possible causes are immediate: the effect of bootstrapping , and the effect of sequential training .
The effect of bootstrapping on capacity has been studied in other contexts (Mobahi et al., 2020; Kumar et al., 2021).
We aim to isolate the effect of sequential prediction tasks on capacity loss.
To minimize the potential for confounding factors to inﬂuence our results, we construct our toy iterative prediction problems on the MNIST data set, which consists of images of handwritten digits and corresponding labels, and manually construct a sequence of targets which the network must ﬁt over the course of training.
We ﬁrst consider labels computed by a randomly initialized neural network f ✓ : we transform input-label pairs ( x, y ) from the canonical MNIST dataset to ( x, f ✓ ( x )) , where f ✓ ( x ) is the network output.
To generate a new task, we simply reinitialize the network; our evaluations consist of 10 iterations of label-generation followed by a training period during which we run a gradient-based optimizer on the network starting from the parameters we obtained in the previous iteration.
We further consider a ‘sparse-reward’ version of MNIST: for each of 10 iterations i , we use the label ˆ y i =
[ y < i ] , where y is the true label of the image. For example, at the ﬁrst iteration, all images are assigned label zero. At the second iteration, the images of the digit zero are assigned label one, while all other inputs retain the zero label. This continues until all inputs are assigned label one at the ﬁnal iteration.
We follow the same training procedure in both cases: optimizing the network for a ﬁxed number of steps on one set of labels, then generating new labels and running the optimization algorithm again from the parameters obtained in the previous phase.
In Figure 2 we see that most networks trained in these two experiments exhibit decreasing ability to ﬁt later target functions under a ﬁxed optimization budget.
This effect is strongest in small networks with ReLU activations, suggesting that this capacity loss may be driven by saturated units and that this phenomenon will be easiest to detect in settings where the network architecture is not highly over-parameterized relative to the prediction task.
The sparse reward setting is particularly intriguing: we do not expect to see a monotone increase in error as the later label functions correspond to ‘easier’ learning problems (i.e. predicting the majority class will already yield reasonably low prediction error), but we do see that for equal difﬁculty, the network obtains greater error on the later target set than the earlier one, and this effect is signiﬁcantly more pronounced than in the random labels tasks.
This suggests that sparse reward signals can be particularly damaging to the ability of networks to ﬁt new target functions.
3. R EPRESENTATION COLLAPSE AND PERFORMANCE
Having shown that networks do indeed lose some notion of target-ﬁtting capacity, we now turn our attention to the interaction between capacity and performance.
To study this phenomenon further, we will use a computationally cheaper measure of network capacity which we call the effective dimension.
An approximation of the rank of a feature embedding, it is both more computationally efﬁcient – as it does not require training a network for several thousand steps – and requires fewer hyperparameter design choices than the previous capacity metric.
This notion of capacity also measures more directly the ability of the network to distinguish input observations and so provides a better measure of how network updates will generalize to other states. This notion of state similarity is particularly relevant to sparse-reward environments, where policy improvement depends on the agent’s ability to distinguish a handful of rewarding states from the vast non-rewarding majority.
Deﬁnition 2 (Effective Dimension) .
Let  : X !
R d be a feature mapping.
Let X n 2 X n be a tuple of n states in
X sampled from some ﬁxed distribution P .
Fix "  0 , and let  ( X n ) 2 R n ⇥ d denote the matrix whose rows are the feature embeddings of states x 2 X n .
Let SVD ( M ) denote the multiset of singular values of a matrix M .
Then the effective dimension of  given input distribution
P is deﬁned to be
[Equation]
for which a consistent estimator can be constructed as follows
[Equation]
The effective dimension is equal to the dimension of the subspace spanned by  ( X ) =
{  ( x ) | x 2 X} when " = 0 and the state space X is ﬁnite.
For ✏ > 0 , it throws away small components of the feature embedding.
In the language of Deﬁnition 1, this has the interpretation of measuring the ability of a linear classiﬁer with bounded weight norm to distinguish the feature embeddings of input states.
We show that ⇢ is well-deﬁned and that ˆ ⇢ n is a consistent estimator in Appendix A.1.
Our analysis in this section superﬁcially resembles that of Kumar et al.
(2021), but with two key differences: ﬁrst, we consider a different deﬁnition of capacity motivated by our previous discussion; concretely, our estimator does not normalize by the maximal singular value.
Second, we are interested in the capacity of agents with unlimited opportunity to interact with the environment.
Online data collection allows for interaction between the representation and behaviour policy, an important feature missing from the limited-data and ofﬂine settings.
Thus prior observations on implicit under-parameterization in the data-limited regime do not immediately explain our observations on capacity loss, nor do they imply that effective dimension should decline in the online RL setting.
In our empirical evaluations, we train a double DQN (DDQN) agent, a quantile regression (QRDQN) agent, and a double DQN agent with an auxiliary random cumulant prediction task (RCDQN)
(Dabney et al., 2021), on environments from the Atari suite, then evaluate ˆ ⇢ n on agent checkpoints obtained during training.
We train on 4 environments: Montezuma’s Revenge (sparse reward), Pong (dense reward), a sparsiﬁed version of Pong in which the agent does not receive negative reward when its opponent scores, and Seaquest (dense reward, but more challenging than Pong).
We runrandom seeds on each environment-agent combination.
We visualize agents’ effective dimension and performance in Figure 3.
Two trends are immediately clear: at the environment level, agents tend to have higher effective dimension in environments with more reward signal.
At the learning objective level, incorporating auxiliary rewards prevents representations from collapsing and in most settings increases the effective dimension over the double
DQN objective, but can have a detrimental effect on learning progress in complex, dense-reward games presumably due to interference between the random rewards and the true learning objective.
Unlike in target-ﬁtting capacity, over the course of training we do not see a consistent downward trend across all games and update objectives, suggesting that while effective dimension is indeed effective at identifying representation collapse, it is measuring a subtly different notion of capacity than simply an agent’s ability to ﬁt new target functions. [Figure]
We observe that representation collapse is most pronounced in the QR-DQN objective, which in sparse-reward environments requires all 201 quantile heads to predict the zero target function.
As a result, the agent’s representation predictably collapses after training in Montezuma’s Revenge to a low-dimensional subspace, in some cases converging to an effective dimension of exactly zero.
We observe a similar, but less pronounced, phenomenon in the double DQN agent.
While the many moving parts in deep RL algorithms make it difﬁcult to isolate the causal effect of a single representation property on performance, Figure 4a reveals a correlation between learning progress and effective dimension on challenging games where agents fail to achieve human-level performance.
We see this correlation in both a Rainbow (Hessel et al., 2018) agent, and an agent trained with the regularizer we will introduce in the coming section – its precise form is not relevant to this discussion.
Further, it is clear that agents whose representations have collapsed do not make learning progress, as demonstrated by the learning curves shown in Figure 4b, which highlights a particularly unlucky random seed that did not observe a point being scored during its initial random exploration period and experienced representation collapse.
Eventually, after several million training frames, its effective dimension increased dramatically, and shortly after this occurred, the agent solved the task.
We conclude that in its extreme form, representation collapse can completely prevent learning progress, but that the relationship between learning progress and effective dimension in less extreme cases is complex and one of many factors inﬂuencing performance in RL.
I N F E R: M ITIGATING C APACITY L OSS WITH F EATURE R EGULARIZATION
The previous section showed that capacity loss occurs in deep RL agents trained with online data, and in some cases appears to be a bottleneck to performance.
We now consider how it might be mitigated, and whether explicitly regularizing the network to preserve its initial capacity improves performance in environments where representation collapse occurs.
Our approach involves a functionspace perspective on regularization, encouraging networks to preserve their ability to output linear functions of their features at initialization.
4. F EATURE - SPACE REGULARIZATION
Our goal is to train a network which preserves its ability to quickly ﬁt new target functions.
To do this, we propose using a training objective that preserves the network’s ability to represent functions it had the capacity to output when it was initialized.
Much like parameter regularization schemes which seek to keep parameters close to their initial values, we wish to regularize a set of network outputs towards their initial values.
Similar perspectives have been used to prevent catastrophic forgetting in continual learning (Benjamin et al., 2019).
There are many approaches that one could take to achieve this goal; the one we will present, Initial Feature Regularization (InFeR), applies an ` 2 regularization penalty on the output-space level by regressing a set of auxiliary linear projection heads on top of the feature layer of the network to match their outputs at initialization.
In our approach, illustrated in Figure 5, we begin with a ﬁxed deep Q-learning neural network with parameters ✓ , and modify the network architecture by adding k auxiliary linear prediction heads
g i
[Table]
[Figure]
u p _ n _ d o w n c h
o pp e r _
c
o mm a n d s e a q u e s t
b
e
r z e r k m o n t e z u m a _ r e v e n g e
[Figure]
m [Figure]
n
[Figure]
[Figure]
i n b
[Figure]
on top of the feature representation  ✓ . We take a snapshot of the agent’s parameters at initialization ✓ 0 , and use the outputs of the k auxiliary heads under these parameters as auxiliary prediction targets. We then construct an auxiliary loss computing the mean squared error between the outputs of the heads under the current parameters g i ( x ; ✓ t ) and their outputs at initialization g i ( x ; ✓ 0 ) .
This approach has the interpretation of amplifying and preserving subspaces of the features that were present at initialization. In practice, we found that scaling the auxiliary head outputs by a constant  increased this ampliﬁcation effect.
This results in the following form of our regularization objective, where we let B denote the replay buffer sampling scheme used by the agent:
[Equation]
We evaluate the effect of incorporating this loss in both DDQN (Van Hasselt et al., 2016) and Rainbow (Hessel et al., 2018) agents, and include the relative performance improvement obtained by the
InFeR agents over Rainbow on 57 games from the Atari 2600 suite in Figure 5, deferring the comparison to DDQN, where the regularizer improved performance slightly on average but only yielded signiﬁcant improvements on sparse-reward games, to the appendix.
We observe a net improvement over the Rainbow baseline by incorporating the InFeR objective, with signiﬁcant improvements in games where agents struggle to obtain human performance.
Though we only show one set of hyperparameters, we found InFeR to be relatively robust to the auxiliary scale ↵ , target scale  , and number of heads k
and so did not do extensive hyperparameter tuning.
The evaluations in Figureare for k = 10 heads with  = 100 and ↵ = 0 .
We further observe in Figure 5 that in addition to improving performance, the InFeR loss reduces target-ﬁtting error on dense-reward games and increases effective dimension in sparse-reward games, though we note some ambiguity in the target-ﬁtting capacity results in Montezuma’s Revenge, which we attribute to the fact that the sparse-reward period of training largely concludes within the ﬁrst 20 million frames, well before the ﬁrst agent checkpoint we consider in our effective dimension and capacity plots is saved.
To ﬁll this gap, we provide additional results in Appendix C. where we show that adding InFeR to the sequential MNIST prediction task reduces target-ﬁtting error.
The striking improvement obtained in the sparse-reward Montezuma’s Revenge environment begs the question of whether such results can be replicated in other RL agents.
We follow the same experimental procedure as before, but now use the DDQN agent; see Figure 6.
We ﬁnd that adding InFeR to the DDQN objective produces a similar improvement as does adding it to Rainbow, leading the DDQN agent, which only follows an extremely naive ✏ -greedy exploration strategy and obtains zero reward at all points in training, to exceed the performance of the noisy networks approach taken by Rainbow in the last 40 million training frames.
This leads to two intriguing conclusions: ﬁrst, that agents which are explicitly regularized to prevent representation collapse can make progress in sparse reward problems without the help of good exploration strategies; and second, that this form of regularization yields signiﬁcantly larger performance improvements in the presence of additional algorithm design choices that are designed to speed up learning progress.
4. U NDERSTANDING H OW I N F E R W ORKS
Having observed that our regularizer both improves performance and mitigates capacity loss, we now take a closer look into the mechanisms by which it may enable learning progress.
While InFeR improves performance on average across the Atari games, it does not do so uniformly: its improvements are concentrated principally on games where the baseline rainbow agent performs signiﬁcantly below the human baseline.
It further clearly slows down progress in a subset of environments such as Asteroids and Jamesbond.
We now take a closer look at the mechanisms by which this regularizer is shaping the agent’s representation in the hopes of explaining this differential effect.
We consider two hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1: InFeR improves performance by preserving a random subspace of the representation that the ﬁnal linear layer can use to better predict the value function.
The effect of the regularizer on other aspects of the representation learning dynamics does not inﬂuence performance.
Hypothesis 2: The InFeR loss slows down the rate at which the learned features at every layer of the network can drift from their initialization in function space, improving the learning dynamics of the entire network to prevent feature collapse and over-ﬁtting to past targets.
The precise subspace spanned by the auxiliary weights is not directly useful to value function estimation.
To evaluate hypothesis 1, we concatenate the outputs of a randomly initialized network to the feature outputs of the network used to learn the Q-function, and train a linear layer on top of these joint learned and random features.
If Hypothesis 1 were true, then we would expect this architecture to perform comparably to the InFeR agents, as the ﬁnal linear layer has access to a randomly initialized feature subspace.
If not, then we would expect the performance of the agents with access to the random features to be comparable to that of the vanilla Rainbow agents.
Figure 7 shows that the latter occurs, conﬁrming that the effect of InFeR on earlier layers is crucial to its success.
We now consider hypothesis 2.
We note that we have constructed InFeR so as to limit the degrees of freedom with which a network can collapse its representation.
This has the potential side effect of reducing the ﬂexibility of the network to make the changes necessary to ﬁt new value functions, which may slow down progress in environments where representation collapse doesn’t occur.
If this is the case, then increasing the dimension of the feature vector to which we apply InFeR should give the network more degrees of freedom to ﬁt its targets, and so reduce or eliminate the performance gap induced by the regularization.
We test this hypothesis by doubling the width of the penultimate network layer and comparing the performance of InFeR and Rainbow on games where InFeR hurt performance in the original network.
We see in Figure 7 that increasing the network’s size reduces, eliminates, or in some cases reverses the performance gap induced by InFeR in the smaller architecture.
We therefore conclude that the principal mechanism by which InFeR affects performance is by regularizing the entire network’s learning dynamics.
R ELATED W ORK
A great deal of recent work on deep reinforcement learning has focused on developing useful auxiliary tasks to improve performance and encourage learned representations to satisfy desirable properties (Jaderberg et al., 2017; Veeriah et al., 2019; Gelada et al., 2019; Machado et al., 2018).
Additional work has analyzed the geometry (Bellemare et al., 2019) and stability (Ghosh & Bellemare, 2020) of the learned features.
A separate line of work considers the linear algebraic properties of agents’ learned representations (Kumar et al., 2021; Gogianu et al., 2021).
A theoretical framework for the analysis of agents’ learning dynamics was proposed by Lyle et al.
(2021), who used this to study the behaviour of RL agents in sparse-reward environments.
In contrast to prior work, which treats the layers of the network which come before the features as a black box, we explicitly study the properties and learning dynamics of the whole network.
A separate line of work has studied the effect of interference between sub-tasks in both reinforcement learning (Schaul et al., 2019;
Teh et al., 2017; Igl et al., 2021) and supervised learning settings (Sharkey & Sharkey, 1995; Ash & Adams, 2020; Beck et al., 2021).
Of particular interest has been catastrophic forgetting, with prior work proposing novel training algorithms using regularization (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017; Bengio et al., 2014; Lopez-Paz & Ranzato, 2017) or distillation (Schwarz et al., 2018; Silver & Mercer, 2002; Li & Hoiem, 2017) approaches.
Methods which involve reinitializing a new network have seen particular success at reducing interference between tasks in deep reinforcement learning (Igl et al., 2021;
Teh et al., 2017; Rusu et al., 2016; Fedus et al., 2020).
A closer relative of our approach is that of Benjamin et al.
(2019), which also applies a functionspace regularization approach, but which involves saving input-output pairs into a memory bank with the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
Unlike prior work, InFeR seeks to maximize performance on future tasks, works without task labels, and incurs a minimal, ﬁxed computational cost independent of the number of prediction problems seen during training.
C ONCLUSIONS
This paper has demonstrated a fundamental challenge facing deep RL agents: loss of the capacity to distinguish states and represent new target functions over the course of training.
We have shown that this phenomenon is particularly salient in sparse-reward settings, in some cases leading to complete collapse of the representation and preventing the agent from ever making learning progress.
We’ve also proposed a regularizer to preserve capacity, yielding improved performance across a number of settings in which deep RL agents have historically struggled to match human performance.
Further investigation into this method suggests that it is performing a form of function-space regularization on the neural network, and that settings where it appears the task reduces performance are actually instances of under-parameterization relative to the difﬁculty of the environment.
Particularly notable is the effect of incorporating InFeR in the hard exploration game of Montezuma’s Revenge: its success here suggests that effective representation learning can allow agents to learn good policies in sparse-reward environments even under naive exploration strategies.
Our ﬁndings open up a number of exciting avenues for future work in reinforcement learning and beyond to better understand how to preserve plasticity in non-stationary prediction tasks.