Scott Fujimoto

Scott Fujimoto, Wei-Di Chang, Edward J. Smith et al. · mila

In the field of reinforcement learning (RL), representation learning is a proven tool for complex image-based tasks, but is often overlooked for environments with low-level states, such as physical control problems. This paper introduces SALE, a novel approach for learning embeddings that model the nuanced interaction between state and action, enabling effective representation learning from low-level states. We extensively study the design space of these embeddings and highlight important design considerations. We integrate SALE and an adaptation of checkpoints for RL into TD3 to form the TD7 algorithm, which significantly outperforms existing continuous control algorithms. On OpenAI gym benchmark tasks, TD7 has an average performance gain of 276.7% and 50.7% over TD3 at 300k and 5M time steps, respectively, and works in both the online and offline settings.

Wei-Di Chang, Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera, Scott Fujimoto et al. · mila

We present an algorithm for Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) from expert state observations only. Our approach decouples reward modelling from policy learning, unlike state-of-the-art adversarial methods which require updating the reward model during policy search and are known to be unstable and difficult to optimize. Our method, IL-flOw, recovers the expert policy by modelling state-state transitions, by generating rewards using deep density estimators trained on the demonstration trajectories, avoiding the instability issues of adversarial methods. We demonstrate that using the state transition log-probability density as a reward signal for forward reinforcement learning translates to matching the trajectory distribution of the expert demonstrations, and experimentally show good recovery of the true reward signal as well as state of the art results for imitation from observation on locomotion and robotic continuous control tasks.

Wei-Di Chang, Scott Fujimoto, David Meger et al. · mila

Imitation Learning from Observation (ILfO) is a setting in which a learner tries to imitate the behavior of an expert, using only observational data and without the direct guidance of demonstrated actions. In this paper, we re-examine optimal transport for IL, in which a reward is generated based on the Wasserstein distance between the state trajectories of the learner and expert. We show that existing methods can be simplified to generate a reward function without requiring learned models or adversarial learning. Unlike many other state-of-the-art methods, our approach can be integrated with any RL algorithm and is amenable to ILfO. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this simple approach on a variety of continuous control tasks and find that it surpasses the state of the art in the IlfO setting, achieving expert-level performance across a range of evaluation domains even when observing only a single expert trajectory without actions.

Scott Fujimoto, David Meger, Doina Precup et al.

In this work, we study the use of the Bellman equation as a surrogate objective for value prediction accuracy. While the Bellman equation is uniquely solved by the true value function over all state-action pairs, we find that the Bellman error (the difference between both sides of the equation) is a poor proxy for the accuracy of the value function. In particular, we show that (1) due to cancellations from both sides of the Bellman equation, the magnitude of the Bellman error is only weakly related to the distance to the true value function, even when considering all state-action pairs, and (2) in the finite data regime, the Bellman equation can be satisfied exactly by infinitely many suboptimal solutions. This means that the Bellman error can be minimized without improving the accuracy of the value function. We demonstrate these phenomena through a series of propositions, illustrative toy examples, and empirical analysis in standard benchmark domains.

Edward Smith, Scott Fujimoto, David Meger

We consider the problem of scaling deep generative shape models to high-resolution. Drawing motivation from the canonical view representation of objects, we introduce a novel method for the fast up-sampling of 3D objects in voxel space through networks that perform super-resolution on the six orthographic depth projections. This allows us to generate high-resolution objects with more efficient scaling than methods which work directly in 3D. We decompose the problem of 2D depth super-resolution into silhouette and depth prediction to capture both structure and fine detail. This allows our method to generate sharp edges more easily than an individual network. We evaluate our work on multiple experiments concerning high-resolution 3D objects, and show our system is capable of accurately predicting novel objects at resolutions as large as 512$\mathbf{\times}$512$\mathbf{\times}$512 -- the highest resolution reported for this task. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on 3D object reconstruction from RGB images on the ShapeNet dataset, and further demonstrate the first effective 3D super-resolution method.