PsiPhi-Learning: Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrations using Successor Features and Inverse Temporal Difference Learning

Angelos Filos, Clare Lyle, Yarin Gal, Sergey Levine, Natasha Jaques, Gregory Farquhar

In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2021)

Paper | Github (coming soon) | Poster | ICML Talk | Slides

Abstract

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with no-reward demonstrations, a setting in which an RL agent has access to additional data from the interaction of other agents with the same environment. However, it has no access to the rewards or goals of these agents, and their objectives and levels of expertise may vary widely. These assumptions are common in multi-agent settings, such as autonomous driving. To effectively use this data, we turn to the framework of successor features. This allows us to disentangle shared features and dynamics of the environment from agent-specific rewards and policies. We propose a multi-task inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithm, called inverse temporal difference learning (ITD), that learns shared state features, alongside per-agent successor features and preference vectors, purely from demonstrations without reward labels. We further show how to seamlessly integrate ITD with learning from online environment interactions, arriving at a novel algorithm for reinforcement learning with demonstrations, called ΨΦ-learning (pronounced `Sci-Fi'). We provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness of ΨΦ-learning as a method for improving RL, IRL, imitation, and few-shot transfer, and derive worst-case bounds for its performance in zero-shot transfer to new tasks.