Reinforcement learning has been successful in training autonomous agents to accomplish goals in complex environments. Although this has been adapted to multiple settings, including robotics and computer games, human players often find it easier to obtain higher rewards in some environments than reinforcement learning algorithms. This is especially true of high-dimensional state spaces where the reward obtained by the agent is sparse or extremely delayed. In this paper, we seek to effectively integrate feedback signals supplied by a human operator with deep reinforcement learning algorithms in high-dimensional state spaces. We call this FRESH (Feedback-based REward SHaping). During training, a human operator is presented with trajectories from a replay buffer and then provides feedback on states and actions in the trajectory. In order to generalize feedback signals provided by the human operator to previously unseen states and actions at test-time, we use a feedback neural network. We use an ensemble of neural networks with a shared network architecture to represent model uncertainty and the confidence of the neural network in its output. The output of the feedback neural network is converted to a shaping reward that is augmented to the reward provided by the environment. We evaluate our approach on the Bowling and Skiing Atari games in the arcade learning environment. Although human experts have been able to achieve high scores in these environments, state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms perform poorly. We observe that FRESH is able to achieve much higher scores than state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms in both environments. FRESH also achieves a 21.4% higher score than a human expert in Bowling and does as well as a human expert in Skiing.
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）
Providing reinforcement learning agents with informationally rich human knowledge can dramatically improve various aspects of learning. Prior work has developed different kinds of shaping methods that enable agents to learn efficiently in complex environments. All these methods, however, tailor human guidance to agents in specialized shaping procedures, thus embodying various characteristics and advantages in different domains. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between different shaping methods for more robust learning performance. We propose an adaptive shaping algorithm which is ca…
U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
While recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have allowed autonomous learning agents to succeed at a variety of complex tasks, existing algorithms generally require a lot of training data. One way to increase the speed at which agents are able to learn to perform tasks is by leveraging the input of human trainers. Although such input can take many forms, real-time, scalar-valued feedback is especially useful in situations where it proves difficult or impossible for humans to provide expert demonstrations. Previous approaches have shown the usefulness of human input provided in this fas…
Recent advances in deep neuroevolution have demonstrated that evolutionary algorithms, such as evolution strategies (ES) and genetic algorithms (GA), can scale to train deep neural networks to solve difficult reinforcement learning (RL) problems. However, it remains a challenge to analyze and interpret the underlying process of neuroevolution in such high dimensions. To begin to address this challenge, this paper presents an interactive data visualization tool called VINE (Visual Inspector for NeuroEvolution) aimed at helping neuroevolution researchers and end-users better understand and explo…
Interactive reinforcement learning agents use human feedback or instruction to help them learn in complex environments. Often, this feedback comes in the form of a discrete signal that is either positive or negative. While informative, this information can be difficult to generalize on its own. In this work, we explore how natural language advice can be used to provide a richer feedback signal to a reinforcement learning agent by extending policy shaping, a well-known Interactive reinforcement learning technique. Usually policy shaping employs a human feedback policy to help an agent to learn …
In the vision and language navigation task, the agent may encounter ambiguous situations that are hard to interpret by just relying on visual information and natural language instructions. We propose an interactive learning framework to endow the agent with the ability to ask for users' help in such situations. As part of this framework, we investigate multiple learning approaches for the agent with different levels of complexity. The simplest model-confusion-based method lets the agent ask questions based on its confusion, relying on the predefined confidence threshold of a next action predic…
Reward design for reinforcement learning agents can be difficult in situations where one not only wants the agent to achieve some effect in the world but where one also cares about how that effect is achieved. For example, we might wish for an agent to adhere to a tacit understanding of commonsense, align itself to a preference for how to behave for purposes of safety, or taking on a particular role in an interactive game. Storytelling is a mode for communicating tacit procedural knowledge. We introduce a technique, Story Shaping, in which a reinforcement learning agent infers tacit knowledge …
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Universidad Central de Chile（智利中央大学）；Osaka University（大阪大学）；National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（信息通信研究机构）
Interactive reinforcement learning has become an important apprenticeship approach to speed up convergence in classic reinforcement learning problems. In this regard, a variant of interactive reinforcement learning is policy shaping which uses a parent-like trainer to propose the next action to be performed and by doing so reduces the search space by advice. On some occasions, the trainer may be another artificial agent which in turn was trained using reinforcement learning methods to afterward becoming an advisor for other learner-agents. In this work, we analyze internal representations and …
Universidade de Pernambuco（伯南布哥大学）；Universidad Central de Chile（智利中央大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) related technology has expanded knowledge in the area, bringing to light new problems and challenges that require solutions. Furthermore, because the technology allows processes usually carried out by people to be automated, it is in great demand in industrial sectors. The automation of these vehicles has been addressed in the literature, applying different machine learning strategies. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an automation framework that is frequently used to train autonomous agents. RL is a machine learning paradigm wherein an agent intera…
Fairness Begins with State: Purifying Latent Preferences for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in Interactive Recommendation
Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院重庆绿色智能技术研究所）；Chongqing School, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学重庆学院）；The First Affiliated Hospital, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学第一附属医院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
This paper contributes a first study into how different human users deliver simultaneous control and feedback signals during human-robot interaction. As part of this work, we formalize and present a general interactive learning framework for online cooperation between humans and reinforcement learning agents. In many human-machine interaction settings, there is a growing gap between the degrees-of-freedom of complex semi-autonomous systems and the number of human control channels. Simple human control and feedback mechanisms are required to close this gap and allow for better collaboration bet…
University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
As more machine learning agents interact with humans, it is increasingly a prospect that an agent trained to perform a task optimally, using only a measure of task performance as feedback, can violate societal norms for acceptable behavior or cause harm. Value alignment is a property of intelligent agents wherein they solely pursue non-harmful behaviors or human-beneficial goals. We introduce an approach to value-aligned reinforcement learning, in which we train an agent with two reward signals: a standard task performance reward, plus a normative behavior reward. The normative behavior reward…
RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
Northwestern University（西北大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Microsoft（微软）；New York University（纽约大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡国立管理学院）
AgentGroupChat: An Interactive Group Chat Simulacra For Better Eliciting Emergent Behavior
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Rhine AI（莱茵人工智能公司）；Shanghai University of Engineering and Science（上海工程技术大学）；Xiaohongshu Inc.（小红书公司）；Fudan-Aishu Cognitive Intelligence Joint Research Center（复旦-爱数认知智能联合研究中心）
EAU: Environment-Agent-User Co-evolution for Training User-Centric Agents
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）
