Jijia Liu

Chao Yu, Xinyi Yang, Jiaxuan Gao et al. · bytedance

We consider the problem of cooperative exploration where multiple robots need to cooperatively explore an unknown region as fast as possible. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently become a trending paradigm for solving this challenge. However, existing MARL-based methods adopt action-making steps as the metric for exploration efficiency by assuming all the agents are acting in a fully synchronous manner: i.e., every single agent produces an action simultaneously and every single action is executed instantaneously at each time step. Despite its mathematical simplicity, such a synchronous MARL formulation can be problematic for real-world robotic applications. It can be typical that different robots may take slightly different wall-clock times to accomplish an atomic action or even periodically get lost due to hardware issues. Simply waiting for every robot being ready for the next action can be particularly time-inefficient. Therefore, we propose an asynchronous MARL solution, Asynchronous Coordination Explorer (ACE), to tackle this real-world challenge. We first extend a classical MARL algorithm, multi-agent PPO (MAPPO), to the asynchronous setting and additionally apply action-delay randomization to enforce the learned policy to generalize better to varying action delays in the real world. Moreover, each navigation agent is represented as a team-size-invariant CNN-based policy, which greatly benefits real-robot deployment by handling possible robot lost and allows bandwidth-efficient intra-agent communication through low-dimensional CNN features. We first validate our approach in a grid-based scenario. Both simulation and real-robot results show that ACE reduces over 10% actual exploration time compared with classical approaches. We also apply our framework to a high-fidelity visual-based environment, Habitat, achieving 28% improvement in exploration efficiency.

Jijia Liu, Feng Gao, Qingmin Liao et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control often requires large amounts of online interaction data. Value-based RL methods can mitigate this burden by offering relatively high sample efficiency. Some studies further enhance sample efficiency by incorporating offline demonstration data to "kick-start" training, achieving promising results in continuous control. However, they typically compute the Q-function independently for each action dimension, neglecting interdependencies and making it harder to identify optimal actions when learning from suboptimal data, such as non-expert demonstration and online-collected data during the training process. To address these issues, we propose Auto-Regressive Soft Q-learning (ARSQ), a value-based RL algorithm that models Q-values in a coarse-to-fine, auto-regressive manner. First, ARSQ decomposes the continuous action space into discrete spaces in a coarse-to-fine hierarchy, enhancing sample efficiency for fine-grained continuous control tasks. Next, it auto-regressively predicts dimensional action advantages within each decision step, enabling more effective decision-making in continuous control tasks. We evaluate ARSQ on two continuous control benchmarks, RLBench and D4RL, integrating demonstration data into online training. On D4RL, which includes non-expert demonstrations, ARSQ achieves an average $1.62\times$ performance improvement over SOTA value-based baseline. On RLBench, which incorporates expert demonstrations, ARSQ surpasses various baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in learning from suboptimal online-collected data. Project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/ar-soft-q

Jijia Liu, Chao Yu, Jiaxuan Gao et al.

AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances, enabling them to assist humans in diverse complex tasks and leading to a revolution in human-AI coordination. LLM-powered agents typically require invoking LLM APIs and employing artificially designed complex prompts, which results in high inference latency. While this paradigm works well in scenarios with minimal interactive demands, such as code generation, it is unsuitable for highly interactive and real-time applications, such as gaming. Traditional gaming AI often employs small models or reactive policies, enabling fast inference but offering limited task completion and interaction abilities. In this work, we consider Overcooked as our testbed where players could communicate with natural language and cooperate to serve orders. We propose a Hierarchical Language Agent (HLA) for human-AI coordination that provides both strong reasoning abilities while keeping real-time execution. In particular, HLA adopts a hierarchical framework and comprises three modules: a proficient LLM, referred to as Slow Mind, for intention reasoning and language interaction, a lightweight LLM, referred to as Fast Mind, for generating macro actions, and a reactive policy, referred to as Executor, for transforming macro actions into atomic actions. Human studies show that HLA outperforms other baseline agents, including slow-mind-only agents and fast-mind-only agents, with stronger cooperation abilities, faster responses, and more consistent language communications.