Learning Action Relations for Reinforcement Learning
1University of Southern California (USC), 2NAVER CLOVA, 3KAIST, 4NAVER AI Lab
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022
Problem: Tasks with varying action sets require reasoning of action relations.
Intelligent agents can solve tasks in various ways depending on their available set of actions. However, conventional reinforcement learning (RL) assumes a fixed action set. This work asserts that tasks with varying action sets require reasoning of the relations between the available actions. For instance, taking a nail-action in a repair task is meaningful only if a hammer-action is also available. To learn and utilize such action relations, we propose a novel policy architecture consisting of a graph attention network over the available actions. We show that our model makes informed action decisions by correctly attending to other related actions in both value-based and policy-based RL. Consequently, it outperforms non-relational architectures on applications where the action space often varies, such as recommender systems and physical reasoning with tools and skills.
Approach: Action Graph for Interdependence Learning
Qualitative Results
CREATE: Varying Tool Sets
Task: Select and place tools to push the red ball towards the green goal.
Success Examples on CREATE - AGILE
Failure Examples on CREATE - AGILE
Dig Lava Grid Navigation: Varying Skill Sets
Task: Select navigation or digging skills to quickly get to the green goal while avoiding orange and pink lava

AGILE (Action Relations): Finds Different Optimal Solutions

Baseline (Ignores other actions): Learns a Suboptimal Solution
Visualizing Attention Maps in AGILE
Attention in AGILE (1) Learns tool associations in CREATE, (2) Ensures dig-skill is available before entering Lava in Grid World, (3) Extracts item statistics in RecSim
Quantitative Results
Citation
@inproceedings{
jain2022know,
title={Know Your Action Set: Learning Action Relations for Reinforcement Learning},
author={Ayush Jain and Norio Kosaka and Kyung-Min Kim and Joseph J Lim},
booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2022},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=MljXVdp4A3N}
}