Michał Bortkiewicz

Michał Bortkiewicz, Władysław Pałucki, Vivek Myers et al.

Self-supervision has the potential to transform reinforcement learning (RL), paralleling the breakthroughs it has enabled in other areas of machine learning. While self-supervised learning in other domains aims to find patterns in a fixed dataset, self-supervised goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) agents discover new behaviors by learning from the goals achieved during unstructured interaction with the environment. However, these methods have failed to see similar success, both due to a lack of data from slow environment simulations as well as a lack of stable algorithms. We take a step toward addressing both of these issues by releasing a high-performance codebase and benchmark (JaxGCRL) for self-supervised GCRL, enabling researchers to train agents for millions of environment steps in minutes on a single GPU. By utilizing GPU-accelerated replay buffers, environments, and a stable contrastive RL algorithm, we reduce training time by up to $22\times$. Additionally, we assess key design choices in contrastive RL, identifying those that most effectively stabilize and enhance training performance. With this approach, we provide a foundation for future research in self-supervised GCRL, enabling researchers to quickly iterate on new ideas and evaluate them in diverse and challenging environments. Website + Code: https://github.com/MichalBortkiewicz/JaxGCRL

Stanisław Pawlak, Filip Szatkowski, Michał Bortkiewicz et al.

We introduce a new method for internal replay that modulates the frequency of rehearsal based on the depth of the network. While replay strategies mitigate the effects of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, recent works on generative replay show that performing the rehearsal only on the deeper layers of the network improves the performance in continual learning. However, the generative approach introduces additional computational overhead, limiting its applications. Motivated by the observation that earlier layers of neural networks forget less abruptly, we propose to update network layers with varying frequency using intermediate-level features during replay. This reduces the computational burden by omitting computations for both deeper layers of the generator and earlier layers of the main model. We name our method Progressive Latent Replay and show that it outperforms Internal Replay while using significantly fewer resources.

Michał Bortkiewicz, Jakub Łyskawa, Paweł Wawrzyński et al.

Hierarchical decomposition of control is unavoidable in large dynamical systems. In reinforcement learning (RL), it is usually solved with subgoals defined at higher policy levels and achieved at lower policy levels. Reaching these goals can take a substantial amount of time, during which it is not verified whether they are still worth pursuing. However, due to the randomness of the environment, these goals may become obsolete. In this paper, we address this gap in the state-of-the-art approaches and propose a method in which the validity of higher-level actions (thus lower-level goals) is constantly verified at the higher level. If the actions, i.e. lower level goals, become inadequate, they are replaced by more appropriate ones. This way we combine the advantages of hierarchical RL, which is fast training, and flat RL, which is immediate reactivity. We study our approach experimentally on seven benchmark environments.

Rafał Surdej, Michał Bortkiewicz, Alex Lewandowski et al.

Trainable activation functions, whose parameters are optimized alongside network weights, offer increased expressivity compared to fixed activation functions. Specifically, trainable activation functions defined as ratios of polynomials (rational functions) have been proposed to enhance plasticity in reinforcement learning. However, their impact on training stability remains unclear. In this work, we study trainable rational activations in both reinforcement and continual learning settings. We find that while their flexibility enhances adaptability, it can also introduce instability, leading to overestimation in RL and feature collapse in longer continual learning scenarios. Our main result is demonstrating a trade-off between expressivity and plasticity in rational activations. To address this, we propose a constrained variant that structurally limits excessive output scaling while preserving adaptability. Experiments across MetaWorld and DeepMind Control Suite (DMC) environments show that our approach improves training stability and performance. In continual learning benchmarks, including MNIST with reshuffled labels and Split CIFAR-100, we reveal how different constraints affect the balance between expressivity and long-term retention. While preliminary experiments in discrete action domains (e.g., Atari) did not show similar instability, this suggests that the trade-off is particularly relevant for continuous control. Together, our findings provide actionable design principles for robust and adaptable trainable activations in dynamic, non-stationary environments. Code available at: https://github.com/special114/rl_rational_plasticity.

Raj Ghugare, Michał Bortkiewicz, Alicja Ziarko et al.

How does the amount of compute available to a reinforcement learning (RL) policy affect its learning? Can policies using a fixed amount of parameters, still benefit from additional compute? The standard RL framework does not provide a language to answer these questions formally. Empirically, deep RL policies are often parameterized as neural networks with static architectures, conflating the amount of compute and the number of parameters. In this paper, we formalize compute bounded policies and prove that policies which use more compute can solve problems and generalize to longer-horizon tasks that are outside the scope of policies with less compute. Building on prior work in algorithmic learning and model-free planning, we propose a minimal architecture that can use a variable amount of compute. Our experiments complement our theory. On a set 31 different tasks spanning online and offline RL, we show that $(1)$ this architecture achieves stronger performance simply by using more compute, and $(2)$ stronger generalization on longer-horizon test tasks compared to standard feedforward networks or deep residual network using up to 5 times more parameters.

Michal Nauman, Michał Bortkiewicz, Piotr Miłoś et al.

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional agents. However, many of these techniques have been tested in limited settings, often on tasks from single simulation benchmarks and against well-known algorithms rather than a range of regularization approaches. This limits our understanding of the specific mechanisms driving RL improvements. To address this, we implemented over 60 different off-policy agents, each integrating established regularization techniques from recent state-of-the-art algorithms. We tested these agents across 14 diverse tasks from 2 simulation benchmarks, measuring training metrics related to overestimation, overfitting, and plasticity loss -- issues that motivate the examined regularization techniques. Our findings reveal that while the effectiveness of a specific regularization setup varies with the task, certain combinations consistently demonstrate robust and superior performance. Notably, a simple Soft Actor-Critic agent, appropriately regularized, reliably finds a better-performing policy within the training regime, which previously was achieved mainly through model-based approaches.

Maciej Wołczyk, Bartłomiej Cupiał, Mateusz Ostaszewski et al. · deepmind

Fine-tuning is a widespread technique that allows practitioners to transfer pre-trained capabilities, as recently showcased by the successful applications of foundation models. However, fine-tuning reinforcement learning (RL) models remains a challenge. This work conceptualizes one specific cause of poor transfer, accentuated in the RL setting by the interplay between actions and observations: forgetting of pre-trained capabilities. Namely, a model deteriorates on the state subspace of the downstream task not visited in the initial phase of fine-tuning, on which the model behaved well due to pre-training. This way, we lose the anticipated transfer benefits. We identify conditions when this problem occurs, showing that it is common and, in many cases, catastrophic. Through a detailed empirical analysis of the challenging NetHack and Montezuma's Revenge environments, we show that standard knowledge retention techniques mitigate the problem and thus allow us to take full advantage of the pre-trained capabilities. In particular, in NetHack, we achieve a new state-of-the-art for neural models, improving the previous best score from $5$K to over $10$K points in the Human Monk scenario.

Alicja Ziarko, Michal Bortkiewicz, Michal Zawalski et al.

In classical AI, perception relies on learning state-based representations, while planning, which can be thought of as temporal reasoning over action sequences, is typically achieved through search. We study whether such reasoning can instead emerge from representations that capture both perceptual and temporal structure. We show that standard temporal contrastive learning, despite its popularity, often fails to capture temporal structure due to its reliance on spurious features. To address this, we introduce Combinatorial Representations for Temporal Reasoning (CRTR), a method that uses a negative sampling scheme to provably remove these spurious features and facilitate temporal reasoning. CRTR achieves strong results on domains with complex temporal structure, such as Sokoban and Rubik's Cube. In particular, for the Rubik's Cube, CRTR learns representations that generalize across all initial states and allow it to solve the puzzle using fewer search steps than BestFS, though with longer solutions. To our knowledge, this is the first method that efficiently solves arbitrary Cube states using only learned representations, without relying on an external search algorithm.