Composing Entropic Policies using Divergence Correction

Jonathan J Hunt, Andre Barreto, Timothy P Lillicrap, Nicolas Heess

Abstract:

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made great strides in recent years. An important remaining challenge is the ability to quickly transfer existing skills to novel tasks, and to combine existing skills with newly acquired ones. In domains where tasks are solved by composing skills this capacity holds the promise of dramatically reducing the data requirements of deep RL algorithms, and hence increasing their applicability. Recent work has studied ways of composing behaviors represented in the form of action-value functions. We analyze these methods to highlight their strengths and weaknesses, and point out situations where each of them is susceptible to poor performance. To perform this analysis we extend generalized policy improvement to the max-entropy framework and introduce a method for the practical implementation of successor features in continuous action spaces. Then we propose a novel approach which, in principle, recovers the optimal policy during transfer. This method works by explicitly learning the (discounted, future) divergence between policies. We study this approach in the tabular case and propose a scalable variant that is applicable in multi-dimensional continuous action spaces.
We compare our approach with existing ones on a range of non-trivial continuous control problems with compositional structure, and demonstrate qualitatively better performance despite not requiring simultaneous observation of all task rewards.

Keywords: maximum entropy RL, policy composition, deep rl

TL;DR: Two new methods for combining entropic policies: maximum entropy generalized policy improvement, and divergence correction.