Learning Task-Aware Abstract Representations for Meta-Reinforcement Learning

A central challenge in meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is enabling agents trained on a set of environments to generalize to new, related tasks without requiring full policy retraining. Existing model-free approaches often rely on context-conditioned policies learned via encoder networks. However, these context encoders are prone to overfitting to the training environments, resulting in poor out-of-sample performance on unseen tasks. To address this issue, we adopt an alternative approach that uses an abstract representation model to learn augmented, task-aware abstract states. We achieve this by introducing a novel architecture that offers greater flexibility than existing recurrent network-based approaches. In addition, we optimize our model with multiple loss terms that encourage predictive, task-aware representations in the abstract state space. Our method simplifies the learning problem and provides a flexible framework that can be readily combined with any off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithm. We provide theoretical guarantees alongside empirical results, showing strong generalization performance across classical control and robotic meta-RL benchmarks, on par with state-of-the-art meta-RL methods and significantly better than non-meta RL approaches.

Authors

• Louk van Remmerden
• Zhao Yang University of Oxford
• Shujian Yu UiT - The Arctic University of Norway
• Mark Hoogendoorn
• Vincent Francois-Lavet Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

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