RL$^3$: Boosting Meta Reinforcement Learning via RL inside RL$^2$
This addresses data inefficiency and performance limitations in meta reinforcement learning for AI researchers, offering a principled improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the poor asymptotic performance and generalization issues of meta reinforcement learning methods like RL^2 by proposing RL^3, a hybrid approach that incorporates per-task action-values learned via traditional RL into Meta-RL inputs, resulting in greater cumulative reward, reduced meta-training time, and better generalization to out-of-distribution tasks.
Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods such as RL$^2$ have emerged as promising approaches for learning data-efficient RL algorithms tailored to a given task distribution. However, they show poor asymptotic performance and struggle with out-of-distribution tasks because they rely on sequence models, such as recurrent neural networks or transformers, to process experiences rather than summarize them using general-purpose RL components such as value functions. In contrast, traditional RL algorithms are data-inefficient as they do not use domain knowledge, but do converge to an optimal policy in the limit. We propose RL$^3$, a principled hybrid approach that incorporates action-values, learned per task via traditional RL, in the inputs to Meta-RL. We show that RL$^3$ earns a greater cumulative reward in the long term compared to RL$^2$ while drastically reducing meta-training time and generalizes better to out-of-distribution tasks. Experiments are conducted on Meta-RL benchmarks and custom discrete domains that exhibit a range of short-term, long-term, and complex dependencies.