Exploring an environment with non-linearities in a continuous action space can be optimized by regulating the agent curiosity with an homeostatic drive. This means that a heterostatic drive to move away from habitual states is blended with a homeostatic motivation to encourage actions that lead to states where the agent is familiar with a state-action pair. 

This approach  improves upon forward models and ICM Pathak et al 17 with an enhanced information gain that basically consists of the following: while the reward in \cite{Pathak17} is formulated as the forward model prediction error, the extended forward model loss in this paper is extended by substracting from the forward model prediction error the error knowing not only $s_t$ and $a_t$, but also $a_{t+1}$.

Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning shows that an additional homeostatic drive enhances the information gain of a classical curious/heterostatic agent. 

Implementation: They take advantage of a new Bellman-like equation of information gain and simplify the computation of the local rewards. It could help by prioritizing the exploration of the state-action space according to how hard is to learn each region. 

Background: The concept of homeostatic regulation in social robots was first proposed in Breazeal et al. 04. They extend existing approaches by compensating the heterostacity drive encouraged by the curiosity reward with an additional homeostatic drive.  1) The first component implements the heterostatic drive (same as referred to in Pathak et al 17). In other words, this one refers to the tendency to push away our agent from its habitual state; 2) Homeostatic motivation: the second component is our novel contribution. It encourages taking actions $a_t$ that lead to future states $s_{t+1}$ where the corresponding future action $a_{t+1}$ gives us additional information about $s_{t+1}$. This situation happens when the agent is "familiar" with the state-action pair: $\{s_{t+1}, a_{t+1}\}$.

The article misses exact comparison with Pathak et al regarding a joint task. In this paper the tasks consists of a 3 room navigation map is used to measure exploration.

The general goal of meta-learning systems is to learn useful shared structure across a broad distribution of tasks, in such a way that learning on a new task can be faster. Some of the historical ways this has been done have been through initializations (i.e. initializing the network at a point such that it is easy to further optimize on each individual task, drawn from some distribution of tasks), and recurrent network structures (where you treat the multiple timesteps of a recurrent network as the training iterations on a single task, and train the recurrent weights of the network based on generalization performance on a wide range of tasks). This paper proposes a different approach: a learned proxy loss function. The idea here is that, often, early in the learning process, handcoded rewards aren’t the best or most valuable signal to use to guide a network, both because they may be high variance, and because they might not natively incentivize things like exploration rather than just exploitation. A better situation would be if we had some more far-sighted loss function we could use, that had proved to be a good proxy over a variety of different rewards. 

This is exactly what this method proposes to give us. Training consists of an inner loop, and an outer loop. Each instantiation of the inner loop corresponds to a single RL task, drawn from a distribution over tasks (for example, all tasks involving the robot walking to a position, with a single instantiated task being the task of walking to one specific position). Within the inner loop, we apply a typical policy gradient loop of optimizing the parameters of our policy, except, instead of expected rewards, we optimize our policy parameters according to a loss function we specifically parametrize. Within the outer loop, we take as signal the final reward on the trained policy on this task, and use that to update our parametrized loss. This parametrized loss is itself a neural network, that takes in the agent’s most recent set of states, actions, and rewards at a rolling window of recent timesteps, and performs temporal convolutions on those, to get a final loss value out the other side. In short, this auxiliary network takes in information about the agent’s recent behavior, and outputs an assessment of how well the agent is doing according to this longer-view loss criteria. Because it’s not possible to directly formulate the test performance of a policy in terms of the loss function that was used to train the policy (which would be necessary for backprop), the weights of this loss-calculating network are instead learned via evolutionary strategies. At a zoomed-out level of complexity, this means: making small random perturbations to the current parameters of the network, and moving in the direction of the random change that works the best. 

So, ultimately, you end up with a loss network that takes in recent environmental states and the behavior of the agent, and returns an estimate of the proxy loss value, that has hopefully been trained such that it captures environmental factors that indicate progress on the task, over a wide variety of similar tasks. Then, during testing, the RL agent can use that loss function to adapt its behavior. An interesting note here is that for tasks where the parameters of the task being learned are inferable from the environment - for example, where the goal is “move towards the green dot”, you don’t actually need to give the agent the rewards from a new task; ideally, it will have learned how to infer the task from the environment. One of the examples they use to prove their method has done something useful is train their model entirely on tasks where an ant-agent’s goal is to move towards various different targets on the right, and then shift it to a scenario where its target is towards the left.  In the EPG case, the ant was able to quickly learn to move left, because it’s loss function was able to adapt to the new environment where the target had moved. By contrast, RL^2 (a trained learning algorithm implemented as a recurrent network) kept on moving right as its initial strategy, and seemed unable to learn the specifics of a task outside its original task distribution of “always move right”. 

I think this paper could benefit from being a little bit more concrete about what it’s expected use cases are (like: what kinds of environments lend themselves to having proxy loss functions inferred from environmental data? Which don’t?), but overall, I find the kernel of idea this model introduces interesting, and will be interested to see if other researchers run with it.

The goal of this work is to perform transfer learning among numerous tasks and to discover visual relationships among them. Specifically, while we intiutively might guess the depth of an image and surface normals are related, this work takes a step forward and discovers a beneficial relationship among 26 tasks in terms of task transferability - many of them are not obvious. This is important for scenarios when an insufficient budget is available for target task for annotation, thus, learned representation from the 'cheaper' task could be used along with small dataset for the target task to reach sufficient performance on par with fully supervised training on a large dataset.

The basis of the approach is to compute an affinity matrix among tasks based on whether the solution for one task can be sufficiently easily used for another task. This approach does not impose human intuition about the task relationships and chooses task transferability based on the quality of a transfer operation in a fully computational manner.

The task taxonomy (i.e. **taskonomy**) is a computationally found directed hypergraph that captures the notion of task transferability over any given task dictionary. It performed using a four-step process depicted in the figure below: ![Process overview. The steps involved in creating the taxonomy.](http://taskonomy.stanford.edu/img/svg/Process.svg)

-  In stage I (**Task-specific Modelling**), a task-specific network is trained in a fully supervised manner. The network is composed of the encoder (modified ResNet-50), and fully convolutional decoder for pixel-to-pixel tasks, or 2-3 FC layers for low-dimensional tasks. Dataset consists of 4 million images of indoor scenes from about 600 buildings; every image has an annotation for every task.

- In stage II (**Transfer modeling**), all feasible transfers between sources and targets are trained (multiple inputs task to single target transfer is also considered). Specifically, after the task-specific networks are trained in stage I, the weights of an encoder are fixed (frozen network is used to extract representations only) and the representation from the encoder is used to train a small readout network (similar to a decoder from stage I) with a new task as a target (i.e. ground truth is available). In total, about 3000 transfer possibilities are trained.

- In stage III (**Taxonomy solver**), the task affinities acquired from the transfer functions performance are normalized. This is needed because different tasks lie in different spaces and transfer function scale. This is performed using ordinal normalization - Analytical Hierarchy Process (details are in the paper - Section 3.3). This results in an affinity matrix where a complete graph of relationships is completely normalized and this graph quantifies a pair-wise set of tasks evaluated in terms of a transfer function (i.e. task dependency).

- In stage IV (**Computed Taxonomy**), a hypergraph which can predict the performance of any transfer policy and optimize for the optimal one is synthesized. This is solved using Binary Integer Program as a subgraph selection problem where tasks are nodes and transfers are edges. After the optimization process, the solution devices a connectivity that solves all target tasks, maximizes their collective performance while using only available source tasks under user-specified constraints (e.g. budget).

So, if you want to train your network on an unseen task, you can obtain pretrained weights for existing tasks from the [project page](https://github.com/StanfordVL/taskonomy/tree/master/taskbank), train readout functions against each task (as well as combination of multiple inputs), build an affinity matrix to know where your task is positioned against the other ones, and through subgraph selection procedure observe what tasks have favourable influence on your task. Consequently, you can train your task with much less data by utilizing representations from the existing tasks which share visual significance with your task. Magnificent!

[Summary by author /u/SirJAM_armedi](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/8sq0jy/rudder_reinforcement_learning_algorithm_that_is/e11swv8/).

Math aside, the "big idea" of RUDDER is the following: We use an LSTM to predict the return of an episode. To do this, the LSTM will have to recognize what actually causes the reward (e.g. "shooting the gun in the right direction causes the reward, even if we get the reward only once the bullet hits the enemy after travelling along the screen"). We then use a salience method (e.g. LRP or integrated gradients) to get that information out of the LSTM, and redistribute the reward accordingly (i.e., we then give reward already once the gun is shot in the right direction). Once the reward is redistributed this way, solving/learning the actual Reinforcement Learning problem is much, much easier and as we prove in the paper, the optimal policy does not change with this redistribution.

This is a paper where I keep being torn between the response of “this is so simple it’s brilliant; why haven’t people done it before,” and “this is so simple it’s almost tautological, and the results I’m seeing aren’t actually that surprising”. The basic observation this paper makes is one made frequently before, most recently to my memory by Geoff Hinton in his Capsule Net paper: sometimes the translation invariance of convolutional networks can be a bad thing, and lead to worse performance. In a lot of ways, translation invariance is one of the benefits of using a convolutional architecture in the first place: instead of having to learn separate feature detectors for “a frog in this corner” and “a frog in that corner,” we can instead use the same feature detector, and just move it over different areas of the image. However, this paper argues, this makes convolutional networks perform worse than might naively be expected at tasks that require them to remember or act in accordance with coordinates of elements within an image. 

For example, they find that normal convolutional networks take nearly an hour and 200K worth of parameters to learn to “predict” the one-hot encoding of a pixel, when given the (x,y) coordinates of that pixel as input, and only get up to about 80% accuracy. Similarly, trying to take an input image with only one pixel active, and predict the (x,y) coordinates as output, is something the network is able to do successfully, but only when the test points are sampled from the same spatial region as the training points: if the test points are from a held-out quadrant, the model can’t extrapolate to the (x, y) coordinates there, and totally falls apart. 

https://i.imgur.com/x6phN4p.png

The solution proposed by the authors is a really simple one: at one or more layers within the network, in addition to the feature channels sent up from the prior layer, add two addition channels: one with a with deterministic values going from -1 (left) to 1 (right), and the other going top to bottom. This essentially adds two fixed “features” to each pixel, which jointly carry information about where it is in space. Just by adding this small change, we give the network the ability to use spatial information or not, as it sees fit. If these features don’t prove useful, their weights will stay around their initialization values of expectation-zero, and the behavior should be much like a normal convolutional net. However, if it proves useful, convolution filters at the next layer can take position information into account. It’s easy to see how this would be useful for this paper’s toy problems: you can just create a feature detector for “if this pixel is active, pass forward information about it’s spatial position,” and predict the (x, y) coordinates out easily. You can also imagine this capability helping with more typical image classification problems, by having feature filters that carry with them not only content information, but information about where a pattern was found spatially.  

The authors do indeed find comparable performance or small benefits to ImageNet, MNIST, and Atari RL, when applying their layers in lieu of normal convolutional layer. On GANs in particular, they find less mode collapse, though I don’t yet 100% follow the intuition of why this would be the case. 
https://i.imgur.com/wu7wQZr.png