Skip to content

Research / Peer reviewed

  • Category: Peer reviewed
  • reinforcement-learning
  • reward-redistribution
  • learning-from-demonstrations
  • research-paper

Align-RUDDER: Learning From Few Demonstrations by Reward Redistribution

Vihang Patil, Markus Hofmarcher, Marius-Constantin Dinu, Matthias Dorfer, Patrick Blies, Johannes Brandstetter, José Arjona-Medina, Sepp Hochreiter

Venue
ICML
Year
2022
Citations
66
Length
42 pages
Read the explainer Download PDF View on arXiv (opens in a new tab)

Abstract

Reinforcement learning algorithms require many samples when solving complex hierarchical tasks with sparse and delayed rewards. For such complex tasks, the recently proposed RUDDER uses reward redistribution to leverage steps in the Q-function that are associated with accomplishing sub-tasks. However, often only few episodes with high rewards are available as demonstrations since current exploration strategies cannot discover them in reasonable time. In this work, we introduce Align-RUDDER, which utilizes a profile model for reward redistribution that is obtained from multiple sequence alignment of demonstrations. Consequently, Align-RUDDER employs reward redistribution effectively and, thereby, drastically improves learning on few demonstrations. Align-RUDDER outperforms competitors on complex artificial tasks with delayed rewards and few demonstrations. On the Minecraft ObtainDiamond task, Align-RUDDER is able to mine a diamond, though not frequently. Code is available at github.com/ml-jku/align-rudder.

Cite this paper

Download .ris Open in RefWorks 
@inproceedings{patil2022align,
  author        = {Patil, Vihang and Hofmarcher, Markus and Dinu, Marius-Constantin and Dorfer, Matthias and Blies, Patrick and Brandstetter, Johannes and Arjona-Medina, José and Hochreiter, Sepp},
  title         = {{Align-RUDDER}: Learning From Few Demonstrations by Reward Redistribution},
  booktitle     = {ICML},
  year          = {2022},
  url           = {https://www.dinu.at/research/align-rudder-learning-from-few-demonstrations-by-reward-redistribution},
}

More peer reviewed