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Amy Zhang

Alumni

Publications

Learning Robust State Abstractions for Hidden-Parameter Block MDPS
Amy Zhang
Shagun Sodhani
Khimya Khetarpal
Joelle Pineau
2020-12-31
ICLR (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Intervention Design for Effective Sim2Real Transfer
Melissa Mozian
Amy Zhang
Joelle Pineau
David Meger
The goal of this work is to address the recent success of domain randomization and data augmentation for the sim2real setting. We explain th… (see more)is success through the lens of causal inference, positioning domain randomization and data augmentation as interventions on the environment which encourage invariance to irrelevant features. Such interventions include visual perturbations that have no effect on reward and dynamics. This encourages the learning algorithm to be robust to these types of variations and learn to attend to the true causal mechanisms for solving the task. This connection leads to two key findings: (1) perturbations to the environment do not have to be realistic, but merely show variation along dimensions that also vary in the real world, and (2) use of an explicit invariance-inducing objective improves generalization in sim2sim and sim2real transfer settings over just data augmentation or domain randomization alone. We demonstrate the capability of our method by performing zero-shot transfer of a robot arm reach task on a 7DoF Jaco arm learning from pixel observations.
2020-12-02
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Invariant Causal Prediction for Block MDPS
Amy Zhang
Clare Lyle
Shagun Sodhani
Angelos Filos
Marta Kwiatkowska
Joelle Pineau
Yarin Gal
Doina Precup
Generalization across environments is critical to the successful application of reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world challenges. … (see more)In this paper, we consider the problem of learning abstractions that generalize in block MDPs, families of environments with a shared latent state space and dynamics structure over that latent space, but varying observations. We leverage tools from causal inference to propose a method of invariant prediction to learn model-irrelevance state abstractions (MISA) that generalize to novel observations in the multi-environment setting. We prove that for certain classes of environments, this approach outputs with high probability a state abstraction corresponding to the causal feature set with respect to the return. We further provide more general bounds on model error and generalization error in the multi-environment setting, in the process showing a connection between causal variable selection and the state abstraction framework for MDPs. We give empirical evidence that our methods work in both linear and nonlinear settings, attaining improved generalization over single- and multi-task baselines.
2020-11-20
Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning as a Hidden-Parameter Block MDP
Amy Zhang
Shagun Sodhani
Khimya Khetarpal
Joelle Pineau
Multi-task reinforcement learning is a rich paradigm where information from previously seen environments can be leveraged for better perform… (see more)ance and improved sample-efficiency in new environments. In this work, we leverage ideas of common structure underlying a family of Markov decision processes (MDPs) to improve performance in the few-shot regime. We use assumptions of structure from Hidden-Parameter MDPs and Block MDPs to propose a new framework, HiP-BMDP, and approach for learning a common representation and universal dynamics model. To this end, we provide transfer and generalization bounds based on task and state similarity, along with sample complexity bounds that depend on the aggregate number of samples across tasks, rather than the number of tasks, a significant improvement over prior work. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, we empirically compare and show improvements against other multi-task and meta-reinforcement learning baselines.
2020-07-13
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org