Zichuan Lin

Haibin Zhou, Tong Wei, Zichuan Lin et al.

We study the adaption of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), which is considered as a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, from continuous action space to discrete action space. We revisit vanilla discrete SAC and provide an in-depth understanding of its Q value underestimation and performance instability issues when applied to discrete settings. We thereby propose Stable Discrete SAC (SDSAC), an algorithm that leverages entropy-penalty and double average Q-learning with Q-clip to address these issues. Extensive experiments on typical benchmarks with discrete action space, including Atari games and a large-scale MOBA game, show the efficacy of our proposed method. Our code is at: https://github.com/coldsummerday/SD-SAC.git.

Zichuan Lin, Xiapeng Wu, Mingfei Sun et al.

Recent success in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods has shown that policy optimization with respect to an off-policy distribution via importance sampling is effective for sample reuse. In this paper, we show that the use of importance sampling could introduce high variance in the objective estimate. Specifically, we show in a principled way that the variance of importance sampling estimate grows quadratically with importance ratios and the large ratios could consequently jeopardize the effectiveness of surrogate objective optimization. We then propose a technique called sample dropout to bound the estimation variance by dropping out samples when their ratio deviation is too high. We instantiate this sample dropout technique on representative policy optimization algorithms, including TRPO, PPO, and ESPO, and demonstrate that it consistently boosts the performance of those DRL algorithms on both continuous and discrete action controls, including MuJoCo, DMControl and Atari video games. Our code is open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/LinZichuan/sdpo.git}.

Wenzhe Li, Hao Luo, Zichuan Lin et al.

Transformer has been considered the dominating neural architecture in NLP and CV, mostly under supervised settings. Recently, a similar surge of using Transformers has appeared in the domain of reinforcement learning (RL), but it is faced with unique design choices and challenges brought by the nature of RL. However, the evolution of Transformers in RL has not yet been well unraveled. In this paper, we seek to systematically review motivations and progress on using Transformers in RL, provide a taxonomy on existing works, discuss each sub-field, and summarize future prospects.

Tao Jiang, Zichuan Lin, Lihe Li et al.

Large transformer models, trained on diverse datasets, have demonstrated impressive few-shot performance on previously unseen tasks without requiring parameter updates. This capability has also been explored in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents interact with the environment to retrieve context and maximize cumulative rewards, showcasing strong adaptability in complex settings. However, in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), where agents must coordinate toward a shared goal, decentralized policy deployment can lead to mismatches in task alignment and reward assignment, limiting the efficiency of policy adaptation. To address this challenge, we introduce Multi-agent In-context Coordination via Decentralized Memory Retrieval (MAICC), a novel approach designed to enhance coordination by fast adaptation. Our method involves training a centralized embedding model to capture fine-grained trajectory representations, followed by decentralized models that approximate the centralized one to obtain team-level task information. Based on the learned embeddings, relevant trajectories are retrieved as context, which, combined with the agents' current sub-trajectories, inform decision-making. During decentralized execution, we introduce a novel memory mechanism that effectively balances test-time online data with offline memory. Based on the constructed memory, we propose a hybrid utility score that incorporates both individual- and team-level returns, ensuring credit assignment across agents. Extensive experiments on cooperative MARL benchmarks, including Level-Based Foraging (LBF) and SMAC (v1/v2), show that MAICC enables faster adaptation to unseen tasks compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/MAICC.

Tiantian Zhang, Zichuan Lin, Yuxing Wang et al.

A key challenge of continual reinforcement learning (CRL) in dynamic environments is to promptly adapt the RL agent's behavior as the environment changes over its lifetime, while minimizing the catastrophic forgetting of the learned information. To address this challenge, in this article, we propose DaCoRL, i.e., dynamics-adaptive continual RL. DaCoRL learns a context-conditioned policy using progressive contextualization, which incrementally clusters a stream of stationary tasks in the dynamic environment into a series of contexts and opts for an expandable multihead neural network to approximate the policy. Specifically, we define a set of tasks with similar dynamics as an environmental context and formalize context inference as a procedure of online Bayesian infinite Gaussian mixture clustering on environment features, resorting to online Bayesian inference to infer the posterior distribution over contexts. Under the assumption of a Chinese restaurant process prior, this technique can accurately classify the current task as a previously seen context or instantiate a new context as needed without relying on any external indicator to signal environmental changes in advance. Furthermore, we employ an expandable multihead neural network whose output layer is synchronously expanded with the newly instantiated context, and a knowledge distillation regularization term for retaining the performance on learned tasks. As a general framework that can be coupled with various deep RL algorithms, DaCoRL features consistent superiority over existing methods in terms of the stability, overall performance and generalization ability, as verified by extensive experiments on several robot navigation and MuJoCo locomotion tasks.

Zhihui Xie, Zichuan Lin, Junyou Li et al.

The past few years have seen rapid progress in combining reinforcement learning (RL) with deep learning. Various breakthroughs ranging from games to robotics have spurred the interest in designing sophisticated RL algorithms and systems. However, the prevailing workflow in RL is to learn tabula rasa, which may incur computational inefficiency. This precludes continuous deployment of RL algorithms and potentially excludes researchers without large-scale computing resources. In many other areas of machine learning, the pretraining paradigm has shown to be effective in acquiring transferable knowledge, which can be utilized for a variety of downstream tasks. Recently, we saw a surge of interest in Pretraining for Deep RL with promising results. However, much of the research has been based on different experimental settings. Due to the nature of RL, pretraining in this field is faced with unique challenges and hence requires new design principles. In this survey, we seek to systematically review existing works in pretraining for deep reinforcement learning, provide a taxonomy of these methods, discuss each sub-field, and bring attention to open problems and future directions.

Tiantian Zhang, Kevin Zehua Shen, Zichuan Lin et al.

Replaying past experiences has proven to be a highly effective approach for averting catastrophic forgetting in supervised continual learning. However, some crucial factors are still largely ignored, making it vulnerable to serious failure, when used as a solution to forgetting in continual reinforcement learning, even in the context of perfect memory where all data of previous tasks are accessible in the current task. On the one hand, since most reinforcement learning algorithms are not invariant to the reward scale, the previously well-learned tasks (with high rewards) may appear to be more salient to the current learning process than the current task (with small initial rewards). This causes the agent to concentrate on those salient tasks at the expense of generality on the current task. On the other hand, offline learning on replayed tasks while learning a new task may induce a distributional shift between the dataset and the learned policy on old tasks, resulting in forgetting. In this paper, we introduce RECALL, a replay-enhanced method that greatly improves the plasticity of existing replay-based methods on new tasks while effectively avoiding the recurrence of catastrophic forgetting in continual reinforcement learning. RECALL leverages adaptive normalization on approximate targets and policy distillation on old tasks to enhance generality and stability, respectively. Extensive experiments on the Continual World benchmark show that RECALL performs significantly better than purely perfect memory replay, and achieves comparable or better overall performance against state-of-the-art continual learning methods.

Zichuan Lin, Yicheng Liu, Yang Yang et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual question answering tasks, but their reliance on large numbers of visual tokens introduces significant computational overhead. While existing efficient VLM approaches reduce visual tokens through fixed-ratio compression, they operate passively and lack the ability to adapt to varying task requirements. This motivates a fundamental question: Can VLMs autonomously determine the minimum number of visual tokens required for each sample? Inspired by human active vision mechanisms, we introduce AdaptVision, an efficient VLM paradigm that enables adaptive visual token acquisition through a coarse-to-fine approach. Our model initially processes compressed visual tokens from low-resolution images and selectively acquires additional visual information by invoking a bounding box tool to crop key regions when necessary. We train AdaptVision using a reinforcement learning framework that carefully balances accuracy and efficiency. Central to our approach is Decoupled Turn Policy Optimization (DTPO), which decouples the learning objective into two components: (1) tool learning, which optimizes correct tool utilization, and (2) accuracy improvement, which refines the generated responses to improve answer correctness. Based on this formulation, we further decouple advantage estimation by computing separate advantages for tokens associated with each objective. This formulation enables more effective optimization for AdaptVision compared to vanilla GRPO. Comprehensive experiments across multiple VQA benchmarks demonstrate that AdaptVision achieves superior performance while consuming substantially fewer visual tokens than state-of-the-art efficient VLM methods.

Zichuan Lin, Xiaokai Huang, Jiate Liu et al.

The estimation of individual treatment effects (ITE) focuses on predicting the outcome changes that result from a change in treatment. A fundamental challenge in observational data is that while we need to infer outcome differences under alternative treatments, we can only observe each individual's outcome under a single treatment. Existing approaches address this limitation either by training with inferred pseudo-outcomes or by creating matched instance pairs. However, recent work has largely overlooked the potential impact of post-treatment variables on the outcome. This oversight prevents existing methods from fully capturing outcome variability, resulting in increased variance in counterfactual predictions. This paper introduces Pseudo-outcome Imputation with Post-treatment Variables for Counterfactual Regression (PIPCFR), a novel approach that incorporates post-treatment variables to improve pseudo-outcome imputation. We analyze the challenges inherent in utilizing post-treatment variables and establish a novel theoretical bound for ITE risk that explicitly connects post-treatment variables to ITE estimation accuracy. Unlike existing methods that ignore these variables or impose restrictive assumptions, PIPCFR learns effective representations that preserve informative components while mitigating bias. Empirical evaluations on both real-world and simulated datasets demonstrate that PIPCFR achieves significantly lower ITE errors compared to existing methods.

Zhengcheng Wang, Zichuan Lin, Yijun Yang et al.

Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) agents based on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often suffer from perception errors, reasoning errors, and planning errors, which significantly hinder their navigation performance. To address these limitations, a novel VLN agent framework, named SeeNav-Agent, is proposed in this work. First, to reduce perception hallucinations of the visual module of the VLN agent, a dual-view Visual Prompt (VP) technique is introduced in the input space, which can also improve the agent's understanding of current spatial states. Subsequently, a novel step-level Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) method, Step Reward Group Policy Optimization (SRGPO), is designed for the post-training of VLN agents. In SRGPO, we first define verifiable process rewards for the navigation task, and then perform efficient step-level advantage estimation by randomly grouping different navigation steps. SRGPO provides dense reward signals for the reinforcement learning process of the VLN agent and enhances its planning capability. Experimental results on the EmbodiedBench Navigation benchmark indicate that by introducing the zero-shot VP module, the GPT-4.1 achieves a navigation success rate of 86.7%, surpassing the current best LVLM by approximately 20 percentage points (pp). Through post-training based on SRGPO, the Qwen2.5-VL-3B model reaches a navigation success rate of 72.3%, outperforming the best existing LVLM model by 5.6 pp. Moreover, compared to RFT algorithms such as GRPO and GiGPO, the proposed SRGPO demonstrates significant improvements in training stability, convergence efficiency, and generalization capability.

Zhihui Xie, Zichuan Lin, Deheng Ye et al.

Recent research in offline reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated that return-conditioned supervised learning is a powerful paradigm for decision-making problems. While promising, return conditioning is limited to training data labeled with rewards and therefore faces challenges in learning from unsupervised data. In this work, we aim to utilize generalized future conditioning to enable efficient unsupervised pretraining from reward-free and sub-optimal offline data. We propose Pretrained Decision Transformer (PDT), a conceptually simple approach for unsupervised RL pretraining. PDT leverages future trajectory information as a privileged context to predict actions during training. The ability to make decisions based on both present and future factors enhances PDT's capability for generalization. Besides, this feature can be easily incorporated into a return-conditioned framework for online finetuning, by assigning return values to possible futures and sampling future embeddings based on their respective values. Empirically, PDT outperforms or performs on par with its supervised pretraining counterpart, especially when dealing with sub-optimal data. Further analysis reveals that PDT can extract diverse behaviors from offline data and controllably sample high-return behaviors by online finetuning. Code is available at here.

Anssi Kanervisto, Stephanie Milani, Karolis Ramanauskas et al.

Reinforcement learning competitions advance the field by providing appropriate scope and support to develop solutions toward a specific problem. To promote the development of more broadly applicable methods, organizers need to enforce the use of general techniques, the use of sample-efficient methods, and the reproducibility of the results. While beneficial for the research community, these restrictions come at a cost -- increased difficulty. If the barrier for entry is too high, many potential participants are demoralized. With this in mind, we hosted the third edition of the MineRL ObtainDiamond competition, MineRL Diamond 2021, with a separate track in which we permitted any solution to promote the participation of newcomers. With this track and more extensive tutorials and support, we saw an increased number of submissions. The participants of this easier track were able to obtain a diamond, and the participants of the harder track progressed the generalizable solutions in the same task.

Zichuan Lin, Junyou Li, Jianing Shi et al.

Learning rational behaviors in open-world games like Minecraft remains to be challenging for Reinforcement Learning (RL) research due to the compound challenge of partial observability, high-dimensional visual perception and delayed reward. To address this, we propose JueWu-MC, a sample-efficient hierarchical RL approach equipped with representation learning and imitation learning to deal with perception and exploration. Specifically, our approach includes two levels of hierarchy, where the high-level controller learns a policy to control over options and the low-level workers learn to solve each sub-task. To boost the learning of sub-tasks, we propose a combination of techniques including 1) action-aware representation learning which captures underlying relations between action and representation, 2) discriminator-based self-imitation learning for efficient exploration, and 3) ensemble behavior cloning with consistency filtering for policy robustness. Extensive experiments show that JueWu-MC significantly improves sample efficiency and outperforms a set of baselines by a large margin. Notably, we won the championship of the NeurIPS MineRL 2021 research competition and achieved the highest performance score ever.

Zichuan Lin, Jing Huang, Bowen Zhou et al.

Recent work (Takanobu et al., 2020) proposed the system-wise evaluation on dialog systems and found that improvement on individual components (e.g., NLU, policy) in prior work may not necessarily bring benefit to pipeline systems in system-wise evaluation. To improve the system-wise performance, in this paper, we propose new joint system-wise optimization techniques for the pipeline dialog system. First, we propose a new data augmentation approach which automates the labeling process for NLU training. Second, we propose a novel stochastic policy parameterization with Poisson distribution that enables better exploration and offers a principled way to compute policy gradient. Third, we propose a reward bonus to help policy explore successful dialogs. Our approaches outperform the competitive pipeline systems from Takanobu et al. (2020) by big margins of 12% success rate in automatic system-wise evaluation and of 16% success rate in human evaluation on the standard multi-domain benchmark dataset MultiWOZ 2.1, and also outperform the recent state-of-the-art end-to-end trained model from DSTC9.

Zichuan Lin, Garrett Thomas, Guangwen Yang et al.

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn from multiple training tasks the ability to adapt efficiently to unseen test tasks. Despite the success, existing meta-RL algorithms are known to be sensitive to the task distribution shift. When the test task distribution is different from the training task distribution, the performance may degrade significantly. To address this issue, this paper proposes Model-based Adversarial Meta-Reinforcement Learning (AdMRL), where we aim to minimize the worst-case sub-optimality gap -- the difference between the optimal return and the return that the algorithm achieves after adaptation -- across all tasks in a family of tasks, with a model-based approach. We propose a minimax objective and optimize it by alternating between learning the dynamics model on a fixed task and finding the adversarial task for the current model -- the task for which the policy induced by the model is maximally suboptimal. Assuming the family of tasks is parameterized, we derive a formula for the gradient of the suboptimality with respect to the task parameters via the implicit function theorem, and show how the gradient estimator can be efficiently implemented by the conjugate gradient method and a novel use of the REINFORCE estimator. We evaluate our approach on several continuous control benchmarks and demonstrate its efficacy in the worst-case performance over all tasks, the generalization power to out-of-distribution tasks, and in training and test time sample efficiency, over existing state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms.

Zichuan Lin, Li Zhao, Derek Yang et al.

Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have specific properties that can be leveraged to modify existing RL algorithms to adapt to those tasks and further improve performance, and a general class of such properties is the multiple reward channel. In those environments the full reward can be decomposed into sub-rewards obtained from different channels. Existing work on reward decomposition either requires prior knowledge of the environment to decompose the full reward, or decomposes reward without prior knowledge but with degraded performance. In this paper, we propose Distributional Reward Decomposition for Reinforcement Learning (DRDRL), a novel reward decomposition algorithm which captures the multiple reward channel structure under distributional setting. Empirically, our method captures the multi-channel structure and discovers meaningful reward decomposition, without any requirements on prior knowledge. Consequently, our agent achieves better performance than existing methods on environments with multiple reward channels.

Derek Yang, Li Zhao, Zichuan Lin et al.

Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) differs from traditional RL in that, rather than the expectation of total returns, it estimates distributions and has achieved state-of-the-art performance on Atari Games. The key challenge in practical distributional RL algorithms lies in how to parameterize estimated distributions so as to better approximate the true continuous distribution. Existing distributional RL algorithms parameterize either the probability side or the return value side of the distribution function, leaving the other side uniformly fixed as in C51, QR-DQN or randomly sampled as in IQN. In this paper, we propose fully parameterized quantile function that parameterizes both the quantile fraction axis (i.e., the x-axis) and the value axis (i.e., y-axis) for distributional RL. Our algorithm contains a fraction proposal network that generates a discrete set of quantile fractions and a quantile value network that gives corresponding quantile values. The two networks are jointly trained to find the best approximation of the true distribution. Experiments on 55 Atari Games show that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing distributional RL algorithms and creates a new record for the Atari Learning Environment for non-distributed agents.

Guangxiang Zhu, Jianhao Wang, Zhizhou Ren et al.

Object-based approaches for learning action-conditioned dynamics has demonstrated promise for generalization and interpretability. However, existing approaches suffer from structural limitations and optimization difficulties for common environments with multiple dynamic objects. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised learning framework, called Multi-level Abstraction Object-oriented Predictor (MAOP), which employs a three-level learning architecture that enables efficient object-based dynamics learning from raw visual observations. We also design a spatial-temporal relational reasoning mechanism for MAOP to support instance-level dynamics learning and handle partial observability. Our results show that MAOP significantly outperforms previous methods in terms of sample efficiency and generalization over novel environments for learning environment models. We also demonstrate that learned dynamics models enable efficient planning in unseen environments, comparable to true environment models. In addition, MAOP learns semantically and visually interpretable disentangled representations.

Zichuan Lin, Tianqi Zhao, Guangwen Yang et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made huge progress in recent years by leveraging the power of deep neural networks (DNN). Despite the success, deep RL algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, often requiring many rounds of interaction with the environments to obtain satisfactory performance. Recently, episodic memory based RL has attracted attention due to its ability to latch on good actions quickly. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective biologically inspired RL algorithm called Episodic Memory Deep Q-Networks (EMDQN), which leverages episodic memory to supervise an agent during training. Experiments show that our proposed method can lead to better sample efficiency and is more likely to find good policies. It only requires 1/5 of the interactions of DQN to achieve many state-of-the-art performances on Atari games, significantly outperforming regular DQN and other episodic memory based RL algorithms.