Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Decoupling Exploration and UtilizationJingpu Yang, Helin Wang, Qirui Zhao et al.
Reinforcement Learning (RL), recognized as an efficient learning approach, has achieved remarkable success across multiple fields and applications, including gaming, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Classical single-agent reinforcement learning grapples with the imbalance of exploration and exploitation as well as limited generalization abilities. This methodology frequently leads to algorithms settling for suboptimal solutions that are tailored only to specific datasets. In this work, our aim is to train agent with efficient learning by decoupling exploration and utilization, so that agent can escaping the conundrum of suboptimal Solutions. In reinforcement learning, the previously imposed pessimistic punitive measures have deprived the model of its exploratory potential, resulting in diminished exploration capabilities. To address this, we have introduced an additional optimistic Actor to enhance the model's exploration ability, while employing a more constrained pessimistic Actor for performance evaluation. The above idea is implemented in the proposed OPARL (Optimistic and Pessimistic Actor Reinforcement Learning) algorithm. This unique amalgamation within the reinforcement learning paradigm fosters a more balanced and efficient approach. It facilitates the optimization of policies that concentrate on high-reward actions via pessimistic exploitation strategies while concurrently ensuring extensive state coverage through optimistic exploration. Empirical and theoretical investigations demonstrate that OPARL enhances agent capabilities in both utilization and exploration. In the most tasks of DMControl benchmark and Mujoco environment, OPARL performed better than state-of-the-art methods. Our code has released on https://github.com/yydsok/OPARL
21.7ROOct 16, 2024
Hazards in Daily Life? Enabling Robots to Proactively Detect and Resolve AnomaliesZirui Song, Guangxian Ouyang, Meng Fang et al.
Existing household robots have made significant progress in performing routine tasks, such as cleaning floors or delivering objects. However, a key limitation of these robots is their inability to recognize potential problems or dangers in home environments. For example, a child may pick up and ingest medication that has fallen on the floor, posing a serious risk. We argue that household robots should proactively detect such hazards or anomalies within the home, and propose the task of anomaly scenario generation. We leverage foundational models instead of relying on manually labeled data to build simulated environments. Specifically, we introduce a multi-agent brainstorming approach, where agents collaborate and generate diverse scenarios covering household hazards, hygiene management, and child safety. These textual task descriptions are then integrated with designed 3D assets to simulate realistic environments. Within these constructed environments, the robotic agent learns the necessary skills to proactively discover and handle the proposed anomalies through task decomposition, and optimal learning approach selection. We demonstrate that our generated environment outperforms others in terms of task description and scene diversity, ultimately enabling robotic agents to better address potential household hazards.
Enhancing Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Latent Variables: Combining Sparse and Dense PersonaYihong Tang, Bo Wang, Miao Fang et al.
The personalized dialogue explores the consistent relationship between dialogue generation and personality. Existing personalized dialogue agents model persona profiles from three resources: sparse or dense persona descriptions and dialogue histories. However, sparse structured persona attributes are explicit but uninformative, dense persona texts contain rich persona descriptions with much noise, and dialogue history query is both noisy and uninformative for persona modeling. In this work, we combine the advantages of the three resources to obtain a richer and more accurate persona. We design a Contrastive Latent Variable-based model (CLV) that clusters the dense persona descriptions into sparse categories, which are combined with the history query to generate personalized responses. Experimental results on Chinese and English datasets demonstrate our model's superiority in personalization.