He Li

Zhanke Zhou, Jiangchao Yao, Jiaxu Liu et al.

Although link prediction on graphs has achieved great success with the development of graph neural networks (GNNs), the potential robustness under the edge noise is still less investigated. To close this gap, we first conduct an empirical study to disclose that the edge noise bilaterally perturbs both input topology and target label, yielding severe performance degradation and representation collapse. To address this dilemma, we propose an information-theory-guided principle, Robust Graph Information Bottleneck (RGIB), to extract reliable supervision signals and avoid representation collapse. Different from the basic information bottleneck, RGIB further decouples and balances the mutual dependence among graph topology, target labels, and representation, building new learning objectives for robust representation against the bilateral noise. Two instantiations, RGIB-SSL and RGIB-REP, are explored to leverage the merits of different methodologies, i.e., self-supervised learning and data reparameterization, for implicit and explicit data denoising, respectively. Extensive experiments on six datasets and three GNNs with diverse noisy scenarios verify the effectiveness of our RGIB instantiations. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/RGIB.

Jinxin Liu, Lipeng Zu, Li He et al.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy from pre-collected and labeled datasets, which eliminates the time-consuming data collection in online RL. However, offline RL still bears a large burden of specifying/handcrafting extrinsic rewards for each transition in the offline data. As a remedy for the labor-intensive labeling, we propose to endow offline RL tasks with a few expert data and utilize the limited expert data to drive intrinsic rewards, thus eliminating the need for extrinsic rewards. To achieve that, we introduce \textbf{C}alibrated \textbf{L}atent g\textbf{U}idanc\textbf{E} (CLUE), which utilizes a conditional variational auto-encoder to learn a latent space such that intrinsic rewards can be directly qualified over the latent space. CLUE's key idea is to align the intrinsic rewards consistent with the expert intention via enforcing the embeddings of expert data to a calibrated contextual representation. We instantiate the expert-driven intrinsic rewards in sparse-reward offline RL tasks, offline imitation learning (IL) tasks, and unsupervised offline RL tasks. Empirically, we find that CLUE can effectively improve the sparse-reward offline RL performance, outperform the state-of-the-art offline IL baselines, and discover diverse skills from static reward-free offline data.

Yachen Kang, Li He, Jinxin Liu et al.

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) promises to learn a complex reward function with binary human preference. However, such human-in-the-loop formulation requires considerable human effort to assign preference labels to segment pairs, hindering its large-scale applications. Recent approache has tried to reuse unlabeled segments, which implicitly elucidates the distribution of segments and thereby alleviates the human effort. And consistency regularization is further considered to improve the performance of semi-supervised learning. However, we notice that, unlike general classification tasks, in PbRL there exits a unique phenomenon that we defined as similarity trap in this paper. Intuitively, human can have diametrically opposite preferredness for similar segment pairs, but such similarity may trap consistency regularization fail in PbRL. Due to the existence of similarity trap, such consistency regularization improperly enhances the consistency possiblity of the model's predictions between segment pairs, and thus reduces the confidence in reward learning, since the augmented distribution does not match with the original one in PbRL. To overcome such issue, we present a self-training method along with our proposed peer regularization, which penalizes the reward model memorizing uninformative labels and acquires confident predictions. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach is capable of learning well a variety of locomotion and robotic manipulation behaviors using different semi-supervised alternatives and peer regularization.

Yachen Kang, Diyuan Shi, Jinxin Liu et al.

This study focuses on the topic of offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a variant of conventional reinforcement learning that dispenses with the need for online interaction or specification of reward functions. Instead, the agent is provided with fixed offline trajectories and human preferences between pairs of trajectories to extract the dynamics and task information, respectively. Since the dynamics and task information are orthogonal, a naive approach would involve using preference-based reward learning followed by an off-the-shelf offline RL algorithm. However, this requires the separate learning of a scalar reward function, which is assumed to be an information bottleneck of the learning process. To address this issue, we propose the offline preference-guided policy optimization (OPPO) paradigm, which models offline trajectories and preferences in a one-step process, eliminating the need for separately learning a reward function. OPPO achieves this by introducing an offline hindsight information matching objective for optimizing a contextual policy and a preference modeling objective for finding the optimal context. OPPO further integrates a well-performing decision policy by optimizing the two objectives iteratively. Our empirical results demonstrate that OPPO effectively models offline preferences and outperforms prior competing baselines, including offline RL algorithms performed over either true or pseudo reward function specifications. Our code is available on the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/oppo-icml-2023 .