Off Environment Evaluation Using Convex Risk Minimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a convex risk minimization approach to estimate and evaluate the performance gap between simulation and real-world environments for reinforcement learning agents, using trajectory data.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel convex risk minimization algorithm to quantify model mismatch and evaluate RL agent performance across simulated and real environments.

Findings

Effective performance estimation in multiple simulated environments.

Accurate performance prediction for a real robotic arm using remote data.

Convergence rate of the estimator is of order n^{-1/4}.

Abstract

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) methods on robots typically involves training a policy in simulation and deploying it on a robot in the real world. Because of the model mismatch between the real world and the simulator, RL agents deployed in this manner tend to perform suboptimally. To tackle this problem, researchers have developed robust policy learning algorithms that rely on synthetic noise disturbances. However, such methods do not guarantee performance in the target environment. We propose a convex risk minimization algorithm to estimate the model mismatch between the simulator and the target domain using trajectory data from both environments. We show that this estimator can be used along with the simulator to evaluate performance of an RL agents in the target domain, effectively bridging the gap between these two environments. We also show that the convergence rate of our estimator to be of the order of ${n^{-1/4}}$, where $n$ is the number of training samples. In simulation, we demonstrate how our method effectively approximates and evaluates performance on Gridworld, Cartpole, and Reacher environments on a range of policies. We also show that the our method is able to estimate performance of a 7 DOF robotic arm using the simulator and remotely collected data from the robot in the real world.