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Poster
Factored Adaptation for Non-Stationary Reinforcement Learning
Fan Feng · Biwei Huang · Kun Zhang · Sara Magliacane

Wed Nov 30 02:00 PM -- 04:00 PM (PST) @ Hall J #735
in Poster Session 4 »

Dealing with non-stationarity in environments (e.g., in the transition dynamics) and objectives (e.g., in the reward functions) is a challenging problem that is crucial in real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL). While most current approaches model the changes as a single shared embedding vector, we leverage insights from the recent causality literature to model non-stationarity in terms of individual latent change factors, and causal graphs across different environments. In particular, we propose Factored Adaptation for Non-Stationary RL (FANS-RL), a factored adaption approach that learns jointly both the causal structure in terms of a factored MDP, and a factored representation of the individual time-varying change factors. We prove that under standard assumptions, we can completely recover the causal graph representing the factored transition and reward function, as well as a partial structure between the individual change factors and the state components. Through our general framework, we can consider general non-stationary scenarios with different function types and changing frequency, including changes across episodes and within episodes. Experimental results demonstrate that FANS-RL outperforms existing approaches in terms of return, compactness of the latent state representation, and robustness to varying degrees of non-stationarity.

Keywords: non-stationarity · causal RL · non-stationary RL
[ Paper]  [ Poster]  [ OpenReview] 

Author Information

Fan Feng (City University of Hong Kong)
Biwei Huang (University of California, San Diego)
Kun Zhang (CMU & MBZUAI)
Sara Magliacane (University of Amsterdam, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab)

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