Reinforcement learning with convex constraints

Sobhan Miryoosefi, Kianté Brantley, Hal Daumé, Miroslav Dudík, Robert E. Schapire

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

53 Scopus citations

Abstract

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the use of unsafe actions, increase the diversity of trajectories to enable exploration, or approximate expert trajectories when rewards are sparse. In this paper, we propose an algorithmic scheme that can handle a wide class of constraints in RL tasks, specifically, any constraints that require expected values of some vector measurements (such as the use of an action) to lie in a convex set. This captures previously studied constraints (such as safety and proximity to an expert), but also enables new classes of constraints (such as diversity). Our approach comes with rigorous theoretical guarantees and only relies on the ability to approximately solve standard RL tasks. As a result, it can be easily adapted to work with any model-free or model-based RL algorithm. In our experiments, we show that it matches previous algorithms that enforce safety via constraints, but can also enforce new properties that these algorithms cannot incorporate, such as diversity.

Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume32
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event33rd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2019 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Dec 8 2019Dec 14 2019

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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