CoBERL: Contrastive BERT for Reinforcement Learning

Andrea Banino, Adria Puigdomenech Badia, Jacob C Walker, Tim Scholtes, Jovana Mitrovic, Charles Blundell

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Transformer, Deep Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: A new loss and an improved architecture to efficiently train attentional models in reinforcement learning.

Abstract: Many reinforcement learning (RL) agents require a large amount of experience to solve tasks. We propose Contrastive BERT for RL (CoBERL), an agent that combines a new contrastive loss and a hybrid LSTM-transformer architecture to tackle the challenge of improving data efficiency. CoBERL enables efficient, robust learning from pixels across a wide range of domains. We use bidirectional masked prediction in combination with a generalization of recent contrastive methods to learn better representations for transformers in RL, without the need of hand engineered data augmentations. We find that CoBERL consistently improves performance across the full Atari suite, a set of control tasks and a challenging 3D environment.

Community Implementations: [ 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2107.05431/code)