Elahe Aghapour

Roberto Capobianco, Harm van Seijen, Nolan D. Bard et al.

Reinforcement learning has proven to be a valuable tool in the creation of advanced AI and robotic systems, contributing to everything from game playing to robotics to foundation models. Through trial-and-error, these AI systems typically learn one, near-optimal behavior to solve their tasks. However, there are many use cases in which one would like to assert some level of control, preferably in real time, over how the task is solved. We refer to these modifications of a core task as styles. We combine universal value function approximators (UVFAs) with carefully selected training scenarios, learning algorithms, and data augmentation to create a framework for coaching agents that exhibit styles in complex domains. We demonstrate the framework's application in the AAA video games Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo, and in an open-source humanoid test domain. Despite the different nature of the domains -- car racing, stylized game combat, and humanoid walking -- each agent shows strong coherence to the style requests while still satisfying the main task in its domain. Importantly, the techniques outlined in this paper allow an end user to choose the final behavior at run time, giving them flexible control over the final executed performance.

Elahe Aghapour, Nora Ayanian

We are interested in learning models of non-stationary environments, which can be framed as a multi-task learning problem. Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can achieve good asymptotic performance in multi-task learning at a cost of extensive sampling, due to their approach, which requires learning from scratch. While model-based approaches are among the most data efficient learning algorithms, they still struggle with complex tasks and model uncertainties. Meta-reinforcement learning addresses the efficiency and generalization challenges on multi task learning by quickly leveraging the meta-prior policy for a new task. In this paper, we propose a meta-reinforcement learning approach to learn the dynamic model of a non-stationary environment to be used for meta-policy optimization later. Due to the sample efficiency of model-based learning methods, we are able to simultaneously train both the meta-model of the non-stationary environment and the meta-policy until dynamic model convergence. Then, the meta-learned dynamic model of the environment will generate simulated data for meta-policy optimization. Our experiment demonstrates that our proposed method can meta-learn the policy in a non-stationary environment with the data efficiency of model-based learning approaches while achieving the high asymptotic performance of model-free meta-reinforcement learning.