RL$^3$: Boosting Meta Reinforcement Learning via RL inside RL$^2$

TL;DR

RL$^3$ enhances meta reinforcement learning by integrating traditional RL value functions into the meta-learning process, leading to better long-term performance, faster training, and improved out-of-distribution generalization.

Contribution

The paper introduces RL$^3$, a hybrid method combining traditional RL value functions with meta-RL, improving long-term rewards and generalization over existing approaches like RL$^2$.

Findings

RL$^3$ achieves higher cumulative rewards than RL$^2$.

RL$^3$ reduces meta-training time significantly.

RL$^3$ generalizes better to out-of-distribution tasks.

Abstract

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods such as RL$^2$ have emerged as promising approaches for learning data-efficient RL algorithms tailored to a given task distribution. However, they show poor asymptotic performance and struggle with out-of-distribution tasks because they rely on sequence models, such as recurrent neural networks or transformers, to process experiences rather than summarize them using general-purpose RL components such as value functions. In contrast, traditional RL algorithms are data-inefficient as they do not use domain knowledge, but do converge to an optimal policy in the limit. We propose RL$^3$, a principled hybrid approach that incorporates action-values, learned per task via traditional RL, in the inputs to Meta-RL. We show that RL$^3$ earns a greater cumulative reward in the long term compared to RL$^2$ while drastically reducing meta-training time and generalizes better to out-of-distribution tasks. Experiments are conducted on Meta-RL benchmarks and custom discrete domains that exhibit a range of short-term, long-term, and complex dependencies.