Jie Huang

Yifan Song, Da Yin, Xiang Yue et al. · allen-ai, pku

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral components in various autonomous agent systems. In this study, we present an exploration-based trajectory optimization approach, referred to as ETO. This learning method is designed to enhance the performance of open LLM agents. Contrary to previous studies that exclusively train on successful expert trajectories, our method allows agents to learn from their exploration failures. This leads to improved performance through an iterative optimization framework. During the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment while completing given tasks, gathering failure trajectories to create contrastive trajectory pairs. In the subsequent training phase, the agent utilizes these trajectory preference pairs to update its policy using contrastive learning methods like DPO. This iterative cycle of exploration and training fosters continued improvement in the agents. Our experiments on three complex tasks demonstrate that ETO consistently surpasses baseline performance by a large margin. Furthermore, an examination of task-solving efficiency and potential in scenarios lacking expert trajectory underscores the effectiveness of our approach.

Jie Huang, Rongshun Juan, Randy Gomez et al.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved great successes in many simulated tasks. The sample inefficiency problem makes applying traditional DRL methods to real-world robots a great challenge. Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) -- a general model-free imitation learning method, allows robots to directly learn policies from expert trajectories in large environments. However, GAIL shares the limitation of other imitation learning methods that they can seldom surpass the performance of demonstrations. In this paper, to address the limit of GAIL, we propose GAN-Based Interactive Reinforcement Learning (GAIRL) from demonstration and human evaluative feedback by combining the advantages of GAIL and interactive reinforcement learning. We tested our proposed method in six physics-based control tasks, ranging from simple low-dimensional control tasks -- Cart Pole and Mountain Car, to difficult high-dimensional tasks -- Inverted Double Pendulum, Lunar Lander, Hopper and HalfCheetah. Our results suggest that with both optimal and suboptimal demonstrations, a GAIRL agent can always learn a more stable policy with optimal or close to optimal performance, while the performance of the GAIL agent is upper bounded by the performance of demonstrations or even worse than it. In addition, our results indicate the reason that GAIRL is superior over GAIL is the complementary effect of demonstrations and human evaluative feedback.