schwarzer2021pretraining: Pretraining Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

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tags
Reinforcement Learning, Pretraining for Reinforcement Learning

source :

authors
Schwarzer, M., Rajkumar, N., Noukhovitch, M., Anand, A., Charlin, L., Hjelm, R. D., Bachman, P., …
year
2021

Main Idea

The core of this paper proposes a set of objectives claimed to be useful for pre-training across a wide range of dataset qualities. They propose three main objectives: self-predictive representations, goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, and inverse modeling. They believe this covers a wide range of of reinforcement learning centric temporal constraints. This is expected to outperform other monolithic

Objectives

Reason for originally reading

As I’m working on extensions to the (McLeod et al. 2021) paper and deciding to move towards a more applied side of reinforcement learning, I’ve become minorly fascinated by pre-training objectives. Pre-training objectives could lead to “foundational models” of a sort for certain domains, allowing for engineers to more easily engineer rewards to induce the desired behavior.

References

McLeod, Matthew, Chunlok Lo, Matthew Schlegel, Andrew Jacobsen, Raksha Kumaraswamy, Martha White, and Adam White. 2021. “Continual Auxiliary Task Learning.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Curran Associates, Inc.
Schwarzer, Max, Ankesh Anand, Rishab Goel, R. Devon Hjelm, Aaron Courville, and Philip Bachman. 2021. “Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Self-Predictive Representations.” arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.05929.

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