arXiv subjects

Minghuan Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Minghuan Liu.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Looking Ahead to Avoid Being Late: Solving Hard-Constrained Traveling Salesman Problem

Many real-world problems can be formulated as a constrained Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). However, the constraints are always complex and numerous, making the TSPs challenging to solve. When the number of complicated constraints grows, it is time-consuming for traditional heuristic algorithms to avoid illegitimate outcomes. Learning-based methods provide an alternative to solve TSPs in a soft manner, which also supports GPU acceleration to generate solutions quickly. Nevertheless, the soft manner inevitably results in difficulty solving hard-constrained problems with learning algorithms, and the conflicts between legality and optimality may substantially affect the optimality of the solution. To overcome this problem and to have an effective solution against hard constraints, we proposed a novel learning-based method that uses looking-ahead information as the feature to improve the legality of TSP with Time Windows (TSPTW) solutions. Besides, we constructed TSPTW datasets with hard constraints in order to accurately evaluate and benchmark the statistical performance of various approaches, which can serve the community for future research. With comprehensive experiments on diverse datasets, MUSLA outperforms existing baselines and shows generalizability potential.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

PerfectDou: Dominating DouDizhu with Perfect Information Distillation

As a challenging multi-player card game, DouDizhu has recently drawn much attention for analyzing competition and collaboration in imperfect-information games. In this paper, we propose PerfectDou, a state-of-the-art DouDizhu AI system that dominates the game, in an actor-critic framework with a proposed technique named perfect information distillation. In detail, we adopt a perfect-training-imperfect-execution framework that allows the agents to utilize the global information to guide the training of the policies as if it is a perfect information game and the trained policies can be used to play the imperfect information game during the actual gameplay. To this end, we characterize card and game features for DouDizhu to represent the perfect and imperfect information. To train our system, we adopt proximal policy optimization with generalized advantage estimation in a parallel training paradigm. In experiments we show how and why PerfectDou beats all existing AI programs, and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Vision-Language Foundation Models as Effective Robot Imitators

Recent progress in vision language foundation models has shown their ability to understand multimodal data and resolve complicated vision language tasks, including robotics manipulation. We seek a straightforward way of making use of existing vision-language models (VLMs) with simple fine-tuning on robotics data. To this end, we derive a simple and novel vision-language manipulation framework, dubbed RoboFlamingo, built upon the open-source VLMs, OpenFlamingo. Unlike prior works, RoboFlamingo utilizes pre-trained VLMs for single-step vision-language comprehension, models sequential history information with an explicit policy head, and is slightly fine-tuned by imitation learning only on language-conditioned manipulation datasets. Such a decomposition provides RoboFlamingo the flexibility for open-loop control and deployment on low-performance platforms. By exceeding the state-of-the-art performance with a large margin on the tested benchmark, we show RoboFlamingo can be an effective and competitive alternative to adapt VLMs to robot control. Our extensive experimental results also reveal several interesting conclusions regarding the behavior of different pre-trained VLMs on manipulation tasks. We believe RoboFlamingo has the potential to be a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution for robotics manipulation, empowering everyone with the ability to fine-tune their own robotics policy.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation

Generative pre-trained models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in language and vision domains by learning useful representations. In this paper, we extend the scope of this effectiveness by showing that visual robot manipulation can significantly benefit from large-scale video generative pre-training. We introduce GR-1, a straightforward GPT-style model designed for multi-task language-conditioned visual robot manipulation. GR-1 takes as inputs a language instruction, a sequence of observation images, and a sequence of robot states. It predicts robot actions as well as future images in an end-to-end manner. Thanks to a flexible design, GR-1 can be seamlessly finetuned on robot data after pre-trained on a large-scale video dataset. We perform extensive experiments on the challenging CALVIN benchmark and a real robot. On CALVIN benchmark, our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods and improves the success rate from 88.9% to 94.9%. In the setting of zero-shot unseen scene generalization, GR-1 improves the success rate from 53.3% to 85.4%. In real robot experiments, GR-1 also outperforms baseline methods and shows strong potentials in generalization to unseen scenes and objects. We provide inaugural evidence that a unified GPT-style transformer, augmented with large-scale video generative pre-training, exhibits remarkable generalization to multi-task visual robot manipulation. Project page: https://GR1-Manipulation.github.io

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

RITA: Boost Driving Simulators with Realistic Interactive Traffic Flow

High-quality traffic flow generation is the core module in building simulators for autonomous driving. However, the majority of available simulators are incapable of replicating traffic patterns that accurately reflect the various features of real-world data while also simulating human-like reactive responses to the tested autopilot driving strategies. Taking one step forward to addressing such a problem, we propose Realistic Interactive TrAffic flow (RITA) as an integrated component of existing driving simulators to provide high-quality traffic flow for the evaluation and optimization of the tested driving strategies. RITA is developed with consideration of three key features, i.e., fidelity, diversity, and controllability, and consists of two core modules called RITABackend and RITAKit. RITABackend is built to support vehicle-wise control and provide traffic generation models from real-world datasets, while RITAKit is developed with easy-to-use interfaces for controllable traffic generation via RITABackend. We demonstrate RITA's capacity to create diversified and high-fidelity traffic simulations in several highly interactive highway scenarios. The experimental findings demonstrate that our produced RITA traffic flows exhibit all three key features, hence enhancing the completeness of driving strategy evaluation. Moreover, we showcase the possibility for further improvement of baseline strategies through online fine-tuning with RITA traffic flows.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Visual Imitation Learning with Patch Rewards

Visual imitation learning enables reinforcement learning agents to learn to behave from expert visual demonstrations such as videos or image sequences, without explicit, well-defined rewards. Previous research either adopted supervised learning techniques or induce simple and coarse scalar rewards from pixels, neglecting the dense information contained in the image demonstrations. In this work, we propose to measure the expertise of various local regions of image samples, or called \textit{patches}, and recover multi-dimensional \textit{patch rewards} accordingly. Patch reward is a more precise rewarding characterization that serves as a fine-grained expertise measurement and visual explainability tool. Specifically, we present Adversarial Imitation Learning with Patch Rewards (PatchAIL), which employs a patch-based discriminator to measure the expertise of different local parts from given images and provide patch rewards. The patch-based knowledge is also used to regularize the aggregated reward and stabilize the training. We evaluate our method on DeepMind Control Suite and Atari tasks. The experiment results have demonstrated that PatchAIL outperforms baseline methods and provides valuable interpretations for visual demonstrations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Planning Immediate Landmarks of Targets for Model-Free Skill Transfer across Agents

In reinforcement learning applications like robotics, agents usually need to deal with various input/output features when specified with different state/action spaces by their developers or physical restrictions. This indicates unnecessary re-training from scratch and considerable sample inefficiency, especially when agents follow similar solution steps to achieve tasks. In this paper, we aim to transfer similar high-level goal-transition knowledge to alleviate the challenge. Specifically, we propose PILoT, i.e., Planning Immediate Landmarks of Targets. PILoT utilizes the universal decoupled policy optimization to learn a goal-conditioned state planner; then, distills a goal-planner to plan immediate landmarks in a model-free style that can be shared among different agents. In our experiments, we show the power of PILoT on various transferring challenges, including few-shot transferring across action spaces and dynamics, from low-dimensional vector states to image inputs, from simple robot to complicated morphology; and we also illustrate a zero-shot transfer solution from a simple 2D navigation task to the harder Ant-Maze task.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Reinforcement Learning with Automated Auxiliary Loss Search

A good state representation is crucial to solving complicated reinforcement learning (RL) challenges. Many recent works focus on designing auxiliary losses for learning informative representations. Unfortunately, these handcrafted objectives rely heavily on expert knowledge and may be sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose a principled and universal method for learning better representations with auxiliary loss functions, named Automated Auxiliary Loss Search (A2LS), which automatically searches for top-performing auxiliary loss functions for RL. Specifically, based on the collected trajectory data, we define a general auxiliary loss space of size $7.5 \times 10^{20}$ and explore the space with an efficient evolutionary search strategy. Empirical results show that the discovered auxiliary loss (namely, A2-winner) significantly improves the performance on both high-dimensional (image) and low-dimensional (vector) unseen tasks with much higher efficiency, showing promising generalization ability to different settings and even different benchmark domains. We conduct a statistical analysis to reveal the relations between patterns of auxiliary losses and RL performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Plan Your Target and Learn Your Skills: Transferable State-Only Imitation Learning via Decoupled Policy Optimization

Recent progress in state-only imitation learning extends the scope of applicability of imitation learning to real-world settings by relieving the need for observing expert actions. However, existing solutions only learn to extract a state-to-action mapping policy from the data, without considering how the expert plans to the target. This hinders the ability to leverage demonstrations and limits the flexibility of the policy. In this paper, we introduce Decoupled Policy Optimization (DePO), which explicitly decouples the policy as a high-level state planner and an inverse dynamics model. With embedded decoupled policy gradient and generative adversarial training, DePO enables knowledge transfer to different action spaces or state transition dynamics, and can generalize the planner to out-of-demonstration state regions. Our in-depth experimental analysis shows the effectiveness of DePO on learning a generalized target state planner while achieving the best imitation performance. We demonstrate the appealing usage of DePO for transferring across different tasks by pre-training, and the potential for co-training agents with various skills.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning: Problems and Solutions

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), related to a set of complex RL problems, trains an agent to achieve different goals under particular scenarios. Compared to the standard RL solutions that learn a policy solely depending on the states or observations, GCRL additionally requires the agent to make decisions according to different goals. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges and algorithms for GCRL. Firstly, we answer what the basic problems are studied in this field. Then, we explain how goals are represented and present how existing solutions are designed from different points of view. Finally, we make the conclusion and discuss potential future prospects that recent researches focus on.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Towards Applicable Reinforcement Learning: Improving the Generalization and Sample Efficiency with Policy Ensemble

It is challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to succeed in real-world applications like financial trading and logistic system due to the noisy observation and environment shifting between training and evaluation. Thus, it requires both high sample efficiency and generalization for resolving real-world tasks. However, directly applying typical RL algorithms can lead to poor performance in such scenarios. Considering the great performance of ensemble methods on both accuracy and generalization in supervised learning (SL), we design a robust and applicable method named Ensemble Proximal Policy Optimization (EPPO), which learns ensemble policies in an end-to-end manner. Notably, EPPO combines each policy and the policy ensemble organically and optimizes both simultaneously. In addition, EPPO adopts a diversity enhancement regularization over the policy space which helps to generalize to unseen states and promotes exploration. We theoretically prove EPPO increases exploration efficacy, and through comprehensive experimental evaluations on various tasks, we demonstrate that EPPO achieves higher efficiency and is robust for real-world applications compared with vanilla policy optimization algorithms and other ensemble methods. Code and supplemental materials are available at https://seqml.github.io/eppo.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Generative Adversarial Exploration for Reinforcement Learning

Exploration is crucial for training the optimal reinforcement learning (RL) policy, where the key is to discriminate whether a state visiting is novel. Most previous work focuses on designing heuristic rules or distance metrics to check whether a state is novel without considering such a discrimination process that can be learned. In this paper, we propose a novel method called generative adversarial exploration (GAEX) to encourage exploration in RL via introducing an intrinsic reward output from a generative adversarial network, where the generator provides fake samples of states that help discriminator identify those less frequently visited states. Thus the agent is encouraged to visit those states which the discriminator is less confident to judge as visited. GAEX is easy to implement and of high training efficiency. In our experiments, we apply GAEX into DQN and the DQN-GAEX algorithm achieves convincing performance on challenging exploration problems, including the game Venture, Montezuma's Revenge and Super Mario Bros, without further fine-tuning on complicate learning algorithms. To our knowledge, this is the first work to employ GAN in RL exploration problems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Curriculum Offline Imitation Learning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) tasks require the agent to learn from a pre-collected dataset with no further interactions with the environment. Despite the potential to surpass the behavioral policies, RL-based methods are generally impractical due to the training instability and bootstrapping the extrapolation errors, which always require careful hyperparameter tuning via online evaluation. In contrast, offline imitation learning (IL) has no such issues since it learns the policy directly without estimating the value function by bootstrapping. However, IL is usually limited in the capability of the behavioral policy and tends to learn a mediocre behavior from the dataset collected by the mixture of policies. In this paper, we aim to take advantage of IL but mitigate such a drawback. Observing that behavior cloning is able to imitate neighboring policies with less data, we propose \textit{Curriculum Offline Imitation Learning (COIL)}, which utilizes an experience picking strategy for imitating from adaptive neighboring policies with a higher return, and improves the current policy along curriculum stages. On continuous control benchmarks, we compare COIL against both imitation-based and RL-based methods, showing that it not only avoids just learning a mediocre behavior on mixed datasets but is also even competitive with state-of-the-art offline RL methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

MapGo: Model-Assisted Policy Optimization for Goal-Oriented Tasks

In Goal-oriented Reinforcement learning, relabeling the raw goals in past experience to provide agents with hindsight ability is a major solution to the reward sparsity problem. In this paper, to enhance the diversity of relabeled goals, we develop FGI (Foresight Goal Inference), a new relabeling strategy that relabels the goals by looking into the future with a learned dynamics model. Besides, to improve sample efficiency, we propose to use the dynamics model to generate simulated trajectories for policy training. By integrating these two improvements, we introduce the MapGo framework (Model-Assisted Policy Optimization for Goal-oriented tasks). In our experiments, we first show the effectiveness of the FGI strategy compared with the hindsight one, and then show that the MapGo framework achieves higher sample efficiency when compared to model-free baselines on a set of complicated tasks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Energy-Based Imitation Learning

We tackle a common scenario in imitation learning (IL), where agents try to recover the optimal policy from expert demonstrations without further access to the expert or environment reward signals. Except the simple Behavior Cloning (BC) that adopts supervised learning followed by the problem of compounding error, previous solutions like inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and recent generative adversarial methods involve a bi-level or alternating optimization for updating the reward function and the policy, suffering from high computational cost and training instability. Inspired by recent progress in energy-based model (EBM), in this paper, we propose a simplified IL framework named Energy-Based Imitation Learning (EBIL). Instead of updating the reward and policy iteratively, EBIL breaks out of the traditional IRL paradigm by a simple and flexible two-stage solution: first estimating the expert energy as the surrogate reward function through score matching, then utilizing such a reward for learning the policy by reinforcement learning algorithms. EBIL combines the idea of both EBM and occupancy measure matching, and via theoretic analysis we reveal that EBIL and Max-Entropy IRL (MaxEnt IRL) approaches are two sides of the same coin, and thus EBIL could be an alternative of adversarial IRL methods. Extensive experiments on qualitative and quantitative evaluations indicate that EBIL is able to recover meaningful and interpretative reward signals while achieving effective and comparable performance against existing algorithms on IL benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Multi-Agent Interactions Modeling with Correlated Policies

In multi-agent systems, complex interacting behaviors arise due to the high correlations among agents. However, previous work on modeling multi-agent interactions from demonstrations is primarily constrained by assuming the independence among policies and their reward structures. In this paper, we cast the multi-agent interactions modeling problem into a multi-agent imitation learning framework with explicit modeling of correlated policies by approximating opponents' policies, which can recover agents' policies that can regenerate similar interactions. Consequently, we develop a Decentralized Adversarial Imitation Learning algorithm with Correlated policies (CoDAIL), which allows for decentralized training and execution. Various experiments demonstrate that CoDAIL can better regenerate complex interactions close to the demonstrators and outperforms state-of-the-art multi-agent imitation learning methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/apexrl/CoDAIL}.

cs.MA↗