SOTAVerified

Training Agents using Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning

2019-12-05Code Available0· sign in to hype

Rupesh Kumar Srivastava, Pranav Shyam, Filipe Mutz, Wojciech Jaśkowski, Jürgen Schmidhuber

Code Available — Be the first to reproduce this paper.

Reproduce

Code

Abstract

We develop Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning (UDRL), a method for learning to act using only supervised learning techniques. Unlike traditional algorithms, UDRL does not use reward prediction or search for an optimal policy. Instead, it trains agents to follow commands such as "obtain so much total reward in so much time." Many of its general principles are outlined in a companion report; the goal of this paper is to develop a practical learning algorithm and show that this conceptually simple perspective on agent training can produce a range of rewarding behaviors for multiple episodic environments. Experiments show that on some tasks UDRL's performance can be surprisingly competitive with, and even exceed that of some traditional baseline algorithms developed over decades of research. Based on these results, we suggest that alternative approaches to expected reward maximization have an important role to play in training useful autonomous agents.

Tasks

Reproductions