arXiv subjects

Léonard Hussenot

Publications and source records attributed to Léonard Hussenot.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

What Matters for Adversarial Imitation Learning?

Adversarial imitation learning has become a popular framework for imitation in continuous control. Over the years, several variations of its components were proposed to enhance the performance of the learned policies as well as the sample complexity of the algorithm. In practice, these choices are rarely tested all together in rigorous empirical studies. It is therefore difficult to discuss and understand what choices, among the high-level algorithmic options as well as low-level implementation details, matter. To tackle this issue, we implement more than 50 of these choices in a generic adversarial imitation learning framework and investigate their impacts in a large-scale study (>500k trained agents) with both synthetic and human-generated demonstrations. While many of our findings confirm common practices, some of them are surprising or even contradict prior work. In particular, our results suggest that artificial demonstrations are not a good proxy for human data and that the very common practice of evaluating imitation algorithms only with synthetic demonstrations may lead to algorithms which perform poorly in the more realistic scenarios with human demonstrations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Primal Wasserstein Imitation Learning

Imitation Learning (IL) methods seek to match the behavior of an agent with that of an expert. In the present work, we propose a new IL method based on a conceptually simple algorithm: Primal Wasserstein Imitation Learning (PWIL), which ties to the primal form of the Wasserstein distance between the expert and the agent state-action distributions. We present a reward function which is derived offline, as opposed to recent adversarial IL algorithms that learn a reward function through interactions with the environment, and which requires little fine-tuning. We show that we can recover expert behavior on a variety of continuous control tasks of the MuJoCo domain in a sample efficient manner in terms of agent interactions and of expert interactions with the environment. Finally, we show that the behavior of the agent we train matches the behavior of the expert with the Wasserstein distance, rather than the commonly used proxy of performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Show me the Way: Intrinsic Motivation from Demonstrations

The study of exploration in the domain of decision making has a long history but remains actively debated. From the vast literature that addressed this topic for decades under various points of view (e.g., developmental psychology, experimental design, artificial intelligence), intrinsic motivation emerged as a concept that can practically be transferred to artificial agents. Especially, in the recent field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents implement such a concept (mainly using a novelty argument) in the shape of an exploration bonus, added to the task reward, that encourages visiting the whole environment. This approach is supported by the large amount of theory on RL for which convergence to optimality assumes exhaustive exploration. Yet, Human Beings and mammals do not exhaustively explore the world and their motivation is not only based on novelty but also on various other factors (e.g., curiosity, fun, style, pleasure, safety, competition, etc.). They optimize for life-long learning and train to learn transferable skills in playgrounds without obvious goals. They also apply innate or learned priors to save time and stay safe. For these reasons, we propose to learn an exploration bonus from demonstrations that could transfer these motivations to an artificial agent with little assumptions about their rationale. Using an inverse RL approach, we show that complex exploration behaviors, reflecting different motivations, can be learnt and efficiently used by RL agents to solve tasks for which exhaustive exploration is prohibitive.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

What Matters In On-Policy Reinforcement Learning? A Large-Scale Empirical Study

In recent years, on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to many different continuous control tasks. While RL algorithms are often conceptually simple, their state-of-the-art implementations take numerous low- and high-level design decisions that strongly affect the performance of the resulting agents. Those choices are usually not extensively discussed in the literature, leading to discrepancy between published descriptions of algorithms and their implementations. This makes it hard to attribute progress in RL and slows down overall progress [Engstrom'20]. As a step towards filling that gap, we implement >50 such ``choices'' in a unified on-policy RL framework, allowing us to investigate their impact in a large-scale empirical study. We train over 250'000 agents in five continuous control environments of different complexity and provide insights and practical recommendations for on-policy training of RL agents.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

CopyCAT: Taking Control of Neural Policies with Constant Attacks

We propose a new perspective on adversarial attacks against deep reinforcement learning agents. Our main contribution is CopyCAT, a targeted attack able to consistently lure an agent into following an outsider's policy. It is pre-computed, therefore fast inferred, and could thus be usable in a real-time scenario. We show its effectiveness on Atari 2600 games in the novel read-only setting. In this setting, the adversary cannot directly modify the agent's state -- its representation of the environment -- but can only attack the agent's observation -- its perception of the environment. Directly modifying the agent's state would require a write-access to the agent's inner workings and we argue that this assumption is too strong in realistic settings.

cs.LG↗