Feature-Attending Recurrent Modules for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces FARM, a novel architecture with feature-attending recurrent modules that enhances the generalization ability of reinforcement learning agents across object-centric tasks in 2D and 3D environments.

Contribution

FARM employs a distributed, attention-based approach to learn state representations, improving generalization in RL beyond prior object-centric methods.

Findings

FARM outperforms existing architectures in generalization tasks.

FARM effectively captures spatiotemporal regularities.

FARM demonstrates robustness across different environment dimensions.

Abstract

Many important tasks are defined in terms of object. To generalize across these tasks, a reinforcement learning (RL) agent needs to exploit the structure that the objects induce. Prior work has either hard-coded object-centric features, used complex object-centric generative models, or updated state using local spatial features. However, these approaches have had limited success in enabling general RL agents. Motivated by this, we introduce "Feature-Attending Recurrent Modules" (FARM), an architecture for learning state representations that relies on simple, broadly applicable inductive biases for capturing spatial and temporal regularities. FARM learns a state representation that is distributed across multiple modules that each attend to spatiotemporal features with an expressive feature attention mechanism. We show that this improves an RL agent's ability to generalize across object-centric tasks. We study task suites in both 2D and 3D environments and find that FARM better generalizes compared to competing architectures that leverage attention or multiple modules.