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Zichuan Lin

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Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

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preprint2026arXiv

Debiased Model-based Representations for Sample-efficient Continuous Control

Model-based representations recently stand out as a promising framework that embeds latent dynamics information into the representations for downstream off-policy actor-critic learning. It implicitly combines the advantages of both model-free and model-based approaches while avoiding the training costs associated with model-based methods. Nevertheless, existing model-based representation methods can fail to capture sufficient information about relevant variables and can overfit to early experiences in the replay buffer. These incur biases in representation and actor-critic learning, leading to inferior performance. To address this, we propose Debiased model-based Representations for Q-learning, tagged DR.Q algorithm. DR.Q explicitly maximizes the mutual information between the representations of the current state-action pair and the next state besides minimizing their deviations, and samples transitions with faded prioritized experience replay. We evaluate DR.Q on numerous continuous control benchmarks with a single set of hyperparameters, and the results demonstrate that DR.Q can match or surpass recent strong baselines, sometimes outperforming them by a large margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/dmksjfl/DR.Q.

preprint2021arXiv

Model-based Adversarial Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn from multiple training tasks the ability to adapt efficiently to unseen test tasks. Despite the success, existing meta-RL algorithms are known to be sensitive to the task distribution shift. When the test task distribution is different from the training task distribution, the performance may degrade significantly. To address this issue, this paper proposes Model-based Adversarial Meta-Reinforcement Learning (AdMRL), where we aim to minimize the worst-case sub-optimality gap -- the difference between the optimal return and the return that the algorithm achieves after adaptation -- across all tasks in a family of tasks, with a model-based approach. We propose a minimax objective and optimize it by alternating between learning the dynamics model on a fixed task and finding the adversarial task for the current model -- the task for which the policy induced by the model is maximally suboptimal. Assuming the family of tasks is parameterized, we derive a formula for the gradient of the suboptimality with respect to the task parameters via the implicit function theorem, and show how the gradient estimator can be efficiently implemented by the conjugate gradient method and a novel use of the REINFORCE estimator. We evaluate our approach on several continuous control benchmarks and demonstrate its efficacy in the worst-case performance over all tasks, the generalization power to out-of-distribution tasks, and in training and test time sample efficiency, over existing state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms.

preprint2020arXiv

Fully Parameterized Quantile Function for Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) differs from traditional RL in that, rather than the expectation of total returns, it estimates distributions and has achieved state-of-the-art performance on Atari Games. The key challenge in practical distributional RL algorithms lies in how to parameterize estimated distributions so as to better approximate the true continuous distribution. Existing distributional RL algorithms parameterize either the probability side or the return value side of the distribution function, leaving the other side uniformly fixed as in C51, QR-DQN or randomly sampled as in IQN. In this paper, we propose fully parameterized quantile function that parameterizes both the quantile fraction axis (i.e., the x-axis) and the value axis (i.e., y-axis) for distributional RL. Our algorithm contains a fraction proposal network that generates a discrete set of quantile fractions and a quantile value network that gives corresponding quantile values. The two networks are jointly trained to find the best approximation of the true distribution. Experiments on 55 Atari Games show that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing distributional RL algorithms and creates a new record for the Atari Learning Environment for non-distributed agents.