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Jianhao Wang

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15 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning with In-Distribution Online Adaptation

Jianhao Wang
Jin Zhang 0016
Haozhe Jiang
Junyu Zhang
Liwei Wang
Chongjie Zhang

Recent offline meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) methods typically utilize task-dependent behavior policies (e. g. , training RL agents on each individual task) to collect a multi-task dataset. However, these methods always require extra information for fast adaptation, such as offline context for testing tasks. To address this problem, we first formally characterize a unique challenge in offline meta-RL: transition-reward distribution shift between offline datasets and online adaptation. Our theory finds that out-of-distribution adaptation episodes may lead to unreliable policy evaluation and that online adaptation with in-distribution episodes can ensure adaptation performance guarantee. Based on these theoretical insights, we propose a novel adaptation framework, called In-Distribution online Adaptation with uncertainty Quantification (IDAQ), which generates in-distribution context using a given uncertainty quantification and performs effective task belief inference to address new tasks. We find a return-based uncertainty quantification for IDAQ that performs effectively. Experiments show that IDAQ achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Meta-World ML1 benchmark compared to baselines with/without offline adaptation.

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ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Active Hierarchical Exploration with Stable Subgoal Representation Learning

Siyuan Li 0003
Jin Zhang 0016
Jianhao Wang
Yang Yu 0001
Chongjie Zhang

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (GCHRL) provides a promising approach to solving long-horizon tasks. Recently, its success has been extended to more general settings by concurrently learning hierarchical policies and subgoal representations. Although GCHRL possesses superior exploration ability by decomposing tasks via subgoals, existing GCHRL methods struggle in temporally extended tasks with sparse external rewards, since the high-level policy learning relies on external rewards. As the high-level policy selects subgoals in an online learned representation space, the dynamic change of the subgoal space severely hinders effective high-level exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel regularization that contributes to both stable and efficient subgoal representation learning. Building upon the stable representation, we design measures of novelty and potential for subgoals, and develop an active hierarchical exploration strategy that seeks out new promising subgoals and states without intrinsic rewards. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in continuous control tasks with sparse rewards.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

LAPO: Latent-Variable Advantage-Weighted Policy Optimization for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Xi Chen
Ali Ghadirzadeh
Tianhe Yu
Jianhao Wang
Alex Yuan Gao
Wenzhe Li
Liang Bin
Chelsea Finn

Offline reinforcement learning methods hold the promise of learning policies from pre-collected datasets without the need to query the environment for new samples. This setting is particularly well-suited for continuous control robotic applications for which online data collection based on trial-and-error is costly and potentially unsafe. In practice, offline datasets are often heterogeneous, i. e. , collected in a variety of scenarios, such as data from several human demonstrators or from policies that act with different purposes. Unfortunately, such datasets often contain action distributions with multiple modes and, in some cases, lack a sufficient number of high-reward trajectories, which render offline policy training inefficient. To address this challenge, we propose to leverage latent-variable generative model to represent high-advantage state-action pairs leading to better adherence to data distributions that contributes to solving the task, while maximizing reward via a policy over the latent variable. As we empirically show on a range of simulated locomotion, navigation, and manipulation tasks, our method referred to as latent-variable advantage-weighted policy optimization (LAPO), improves the average performance of the next best-performing offline reinforcement learning methods by 49\% on heterogeneous datasets, and by 8\% on datasets with narrow and biased distributions.

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IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Multi-Agent Concentrative Coordination with Decentralized Task Representation

Lei Yuan
Chenghe Wang
Jianhao Wang
Fuxiang Zhang
Feng Chen
Cong Guan
Zongzhang Zhang
Chongjie Zhang

Value-based multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods hold the promise of promoting coordination in cooperative settings. Popular MARL methods mainly focus on the scalability or the representational capacity of value functions. Such a learning paradigm can reduce agents' uncertainties and promote coordination. However, they fail to leverage the task structure decomposability, which generally exists in real-world multi-agent systems (MASs), leading to a significant amount of time exploring the optimal policy in complex scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework Multi-Agent Concentrative Coordination (MACC) based on task decomposition, with which an agent can implicitly form local groups to reduce the learning space to facilitate coordination. In MACC, agents first learn representations for subtasks from their local information and then implement an attention mechanism to concentrate on the most relevant ones. Thus, agents can pay targeted attention to specific subtasks and improve coordination. Extensive experiments on various complex multi-agent benchmarks demonstrate that MACC achieves remarkable performance compared to existing methods.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Multi-Agent Incentive Communication via Decentralized Teammate Modeling

Lei Yuan
Jianhao Wang
Fuxiang Zhang
Chenghe Wang
Zongzhang Zhang
Yang Yu
Chongjie Zhang

Effective communication can improve coordination in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). One popular communication scheme is exchanging agents’ local observations or latent embeddings and using them to augment individual local policy input. Such a communication paradigm can reduce uncertainty for local decision-making and induce implicit coordination. However, it enlarges agents’ local policy spaces and increases learning complexity, leading to poor coordination in complex settings. To handle this limitation, this paper proposes a novel framework named Multi-Agent Incentive Communication (MAIC) that allows each agent to learn to generate incentive messages and bias other agents’ value functions directly, resulting in effective explicit coordination. Our method firstly learns targeted teammate models, with which each agent can anticipate the teammate’s action selection and generate tailored messages to specific agents. We further introduce a novel regularization to leverage interaction sparsity and improve communication efficiency. MAIC is agnostic to specific MARL algorithms and can be flexibly integrated with different value function factorization methods. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baselines and achieves excellent performance on multiple cooperative MARL tasks.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Self-Organized Polynomial-Time Coordination Graphs

Qianlan Yang
Weijun Dong
Zhizhou Ren
Jianhao Wang
Tonghan Wang 0001
Chongjie Zhang

Coordination graph is a promising approach to model agent collaboration in multi-agent reinforcement learning. It conducts a graph-based value factorization and induces explicit coordination among agents to complete complicated tasks. However, one critical challenge in this paradigm is the complexity of greedy action selection with respect to the factorized values. It refers to the decentralized constraint optimization problem (DCOP), which and whose constant-ratio approximation are NP-hard problems. To bypass this systematic hardness, this paper proposes a novel method, named Self-Organized Polynomial-time Coordination Graphs (SOP-CG), which uses structured graph classes to guarantee the accuracy and the computational efficiency of collaborated action selection. SOP-CG employs dynamic graph topology to ensure sufficient value function expressiveness. The graph selection is unified into an end-to-end learning paradigm. In experiments, we show that our approach learns succinct and well-adapted graph topologies, induces effective coordination, and improves performance across a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Episodic Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Curiosity-driven Exploration

Lulu Zheng
Jiarui Chen
Jianhao Wang
Jiamin He
Yujing Hu
Yingfeng Chen
Changjie Fan
Yang Gao

Efficient exploration in deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) still remains challenging in complex coordination problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Episodic Multi-agent reinforcement learning with Curiosity-driven exploration, called EMC. We leverage an insight of popular factorized MARL algorithms that the ``induced" individual Q-values, i. e. , the individual utility functions used for local execution, are the embeddings of local action-observation histories, and can capture the interaction between agents due to reward backpropagation during centralized training. Therefore, we use prediction errors of individual Q-values as intrinsic rewards for coordinated exploration and utilize episodic memory to exploit explored informative experience to boost policy training. As the dynamics of an agent's individual Q-value function captures the novelty of states and the influence from other agents, our intrinsic reward can induce coordinated exploration to new or promising states. We illustrate the advantages of our method by didactic examples, and demonstrate its significant outperformance over state-of-the-art MARL baselines on challenging tasks in the StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Learning Subgoal Representations with Slow Dynamics

Siyuan Li 0003
Lulu Zheng
Jianhao Wang
Chongjie Zhang

In goal-conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL), a high-level policy periodically sets subgoals for a low-level policy, and the low-level policy is trained to reach those subgoals. A proper subgoal representation function, which abstracts a state space to a latent subgoal space, is crucial for effective goal-conditioned HRL, since different low-level behaviors are induced by reaching subgoals in the compressed representation space. Observing that the high-level agent operates at an abstract temporal scale, we propose a slowness objective to effectively learn the subgoal representation (i.e., the high-level action space). We provide a theoretical grounding for the slowness objective. That is, selecting slow features as the subgoal space can achieve efficient hierarchical exploration. As a result of better exploration ability, our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art HRL and exploration methods on a number of benchmark continuous-control tasks. Thanks to the generality of the proposed subgoal representation learning method, empirical results also demonstrate that the learned representation and corresponding low-level policies can be transferred between distinct tasks.

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ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

MetaCURE: Meta Reinforcement Learning with Empowerment-Driven Exploration

Jin Zhang 0016
Jianhao Wang
Hao Hu 0006
Tong Chen
Yingfeng Chen
Changjie Fan
Chongjie Zhang

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires quickly finding informative task-relevant experiences in both meta-training and adaptation. To address this challenge, we explicitly model an exploration policy learning problem for meta-RL, which is separated from exploitation policy learning, and introduce a novel empowerment-driven exploration objective, which aims to maximize information gain for task identification. We derive a corresponding intrinsic reward and develop a new off-policy meta-RL framework, which efficiently learns separate context-aware exploration and exploitation policies by sharing the knowledge of task inference. Experimental evaluation shows that our meta-RL method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on various sparse-reward MuJoCo locomotion tasks and more complex sparse-reward Meta-World tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Offline Reinforcement Learning with Reverse Model-based Imagination

Jianhao Wang
Wenzhe Li
Haozhe Jiang
Guangxiang Zhu
Siyuan Li
Chongjie Zhang

In offline reinforcement learning (offline RL), one of the main challenges is to deal with the distributional shift between the learning policy and the given dataset. To address this problem, recent offline RL methods attempt to introduce conservatism bias to encourage learning in high-confidence areas. Model-free approaches directly encode such bias into policy or value function learning using conservative regularizations or special network structures, but their constrained policy search limits the generalization beyond the offline dataset. Model-based approaches learn forward dynamics models with conservatism quantifications and then generate imaginary trajectories to extend the offline datasets. However, due to limited samples in offline datasets, conservatism quantifications often suffer from overgeneralization in out-of-support regions. The unreliable conservative measures will mislead forward model-based imaginations to undesired areas, leading to overaggressive behaviors. To encourage more conservatism, we propose a novel model-based offline RL framework, called Reverse Offline Model-based Imagination (ROMI). We learn a reverse dynamics model in conjunction with a novel reverse policy, which can generate rollouts leading to the target goal states within the offline dataset. These reverse imaginations provide informed data augmentation for model-free policy learning and enable conservative generalization beyond the offline dataset. ROMI can effectively combine with off-the-shelf model-free algorithms to enable model-based generalization with proper conservatism. Empirical results show that our method can generate more conservative behaviors and achieve state-of-the-art performance on offline RL benchmark tasks.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

QPLEX: Duplex Dueling Multi-Agent Q-Learning

Jianhao Wang
Zhizhou Ren
Terry Liu
Yang Yu 0001
Chongjie Zhang

We explore value-based multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in the popular paradigm of centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE). CTDE has an important concept, Individual-Global-Max (IGM) principle, which requires the consistency between joint and local action selections to support efficient local decision-making. However, in order to achieve scalability, existing MARL methods either limit representation expressiveness of their value function classes or relax the IGM consistency, which may suffer from instability risk or may not perform well in complex domains. This paper presents a novel MARL approach, called duPLEX dueling multi-agent Q-learning (QPLEX), which takes a duplex dueling network architecture to factorize the joint value function. This duplex dueling structure encodes the IGM principle into the neural network architecture and thus enables efficient value function learning. Theoretical analysis shows that QPLEX achieves a complete IGM function class. Empirical experiments on StarCraft II micromanagement tasks demonstrate that QPLEX significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both online and offline data collection settings, and also reveal that QPLEX achieves high sample efficiency and can benefit from offline datasets without additional online exploration.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Towards Understanding Cooperative Multi-Agent Q-Learning with Value Factorization

Jianhao Wang
Zhizhou Ren
Beining Han
Jianing Ye
Chongjie Zhang

Value factorization is a popular and promising approach to scaling up multi-agent reinforcement learning in cooperative settings, which balances the learning scalability and the representational capacity of value functions. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods is limited. In this paper, we formalize a multi-agent fitted Q-iteration framework for analyzing factorized multi-agent Q-learning. Based on this framework, we investigate linear value factorization and reveal that multi-agent Q-learning with this simple decomposition implicitly realizes a powerful counterfactual credit assignment, but may not converge in some settings. Through further analysis, we find that on-policy training or richer joint value function classes can improve its local or global convergence properties, respectively. Finally, to support our theoretical implications in practical realization, we conduct an empirical analysis of state-of-the-art deep multi-agent Q-learning algorithms on didactic examples and a broad set of StarCraft II unit micromanagement tasks.

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ICLR Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Influence-Based Multi-Agent Exploration

Tonghan Wang 0001
Jianhao Wang
Yi Wu 0013
Chongjie Zhang

Intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning aims to address the exploration challenge for sparse-reward tasks. However, the study of exploration methods in transition-dependent multi-agent settings is largely absent from the literature. We aim to take a step towards solving this problem. We present two exploration methods: exploration via information-theoretic influence (EITI) and exploration via decision-theoretic influence (EDTI), by exploiting the role of interaction in coordinated behaviors of agents. EITI uses mutual information to capture the interdependence between the transition dynamics of agents. EDTI uses a novel intrinsic reward, called Value of Interaction (VoI), to characterize and quantify the influence of one agent's behavior on expected returns of other agents. By optimizing EITI or EDTI objective as a regularizer, agents are encouraged to coordinate their exploration and learn policies to optimize the team performance. We show how to optimize these regularizers so that they can be easily integrated with policy gradient reinforcement learning. The resulting update rule draws a connection between coordinated exploration and intrinsic reward distribution. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the significant strength of our methods in a variety of multi-agent scenarios.

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ICLR Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Learning Nearly Decomposable Value Functions Via Communication Minimization

Tonghan Wang 0001
Jianhao Wang
Chongyi Zheng
Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning encounters major challenges in multi-agent settings, such as scalability and non-stationarity. Recently, value function factorization learning emerges as a promising way to address these challenges in collaborative multi-agent systems. However, existing methods have been focusing on learning fully decentralized value functions, which are not efficient for tasks requiring communication. To address this limitation, this paper presents a novel framework for learning nearly decomposable Q-functions (NDQ) via communication minimization, with which agents act on their own most of the time but occasionally send messages to other agents in order for effective coordination. This framework hybridizes value function factorization learning and communication learning by introducing two information-theoretic regularizers. These regularizers are maximizing mutual information between agents' action selection and communication messages while minimizing the entropy of messages between agents. We show how to optimize these regularizers in a way that is easily integrated with existing value function factorization methods such as QMIX. Finally, we demonstrate that, on the StarCraft unit micromanagement benchmark, our framework significantly outperforms baseline methods and allows us to cut off more than $80\%$ of communication without sacrificing the performance. The videos of our experiments are available at https://sites.google.com/view/ndq.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Object-Oriented Dynamics Learning through Multi-Level Abstraction

Guangxiang Zhu
Jianhao Wang
Zhizhou Ren
Zichuan Lin
Chongjie Zhang

Object-based approaches for learning action-conditioned dynamics has demonstrated promise for generalization and interpretability. However, existing approaches suffer from structural limitations and optimization difﬁculties for common environments with multiple dynamic objects. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised learning framework, called Multi-level Abstraction Object-oriented Predictor (MAOP), which employs a three-level learning architecture that enables efﬁcient object-based dynamics learning from raw visual observations. We also design a spatial-temporal relational reasoning mechanism for MAOP to support instance-level dynamics learning and handle partial observability. Our results show that MAOP signiﬁcantly outperforms previous methods in terms of sample efﬁciency and generalization over novel environments for learning environment models. We also demonstrate that learned dynamics models enable efﬁcient planning in unseen environments, comparable to true environment models. In addition, MAOP learns semantically and visually interpretable disentangled representations.

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