Władysław Pałucki

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

Kevin Qiu, Władysław Pałucki, Krzysztof Ciebiera et al.

We introduce RoboMorph, an automated approach for generating and optimizing modular robot designs using large language models (LLMs) and evolutionary algorithms. In this framework, we represent each robot design as a grammar and leverage the capabilities of LLMs to navigate the extensive robot design space, which is traditionally time-consuming and computationally demanding. By introducing a best-shot prompting technique and a reinforcement learning-based control algorithm, RoboMorph iteratively improves robot designs through feedback loops. Experimental results demonstrate that RoboMorph successfully generates nontrivial robots optimized for different terrains while showcasing improvements in robot morphology over successive evolutions. Our approach highlights the potential of using LLMs for data-driven, modular robot design, providing a promising methodology that can be extended to other domains with similar design frameworks.

Michał Bortkiewicz, Władysław Pałucki, Mateusz Ostaszewski et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to solve long-horizon tasks even when training data contains only short fragments of the behaviors. This experience stitching capability is often viewed as the purview of temporal difference (TD) methods. However, outside of small tabular settings, trajectories never intersect, calling into question this conventional wisdom. Moreover, the common belief is that Monte Carlo (MC) methods should not be able to recombine experience, yet it remains unclear whether function approximation could result in a form of implicit stitching. The goal of this paper is to empirically study whether the conventional wisdom about stitching actually holds in settings where function approximation is used. We empirically demonstrate that Monte Carlo (MC) methods can also achieve experience stitching. While TD methods do achieve slightly stronger capabilities than MC methods (in line with conventional wisdom), that gap is significantly smaller than the gap between small and large neural networks (even on quite simple tasks). We find that increasing critic capacity effectively reduces the generalization gap for both the MC and TD methods. These results suggest that the traditional TD inductive bias for stitching may be less necessary in the era of large models for RL and, in some cases, may offer diminishing returns. Additionally, our results suggest that stitching, a form of generalization unique to the RL setting, might be achieved not through specialized algorithms (temporal difference learning) but rather through the same recipe that has provided generalization in other machine learning settings (via scale). Project website: https://michalbortkiewicz.github.io/golden-standard/