Post Hoc Extraction of Pareto Fronts for Continuous Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces MAPEX, a method that extracts Pareto fronts for continuous control by reusing pre-trained policies, enabling efficient multi-objective trade-off analysis without retraining from scratch.

Contribution

MAPEX is a novel offline MORL approach that leverages pre-trained specialists to efficiently construct Pareto fronts, reducing sample costs significantly.

Findings

MAPEX produces comparable Pareto fronts with minimal sample cost.

MAPEX effectively reuses pre-trained policies and critics.

MAPEX outperforms existing methods in sample efficiency.

Abstract

Agents in the real world must often balance multiple objectives, such as speed, stability, and energy efficiency in continuous control. To account for changing conditions and preferences, an agent must ideally learn a Pareto frontier of policies representing multiple optimal trade-offs. Recent advances in multi-policy multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) enable learning a Pareto front directly, but require full multi-objective consideration from the start of training. In practice, multi-objective preferences often arise after a policy has already been trained on a single specialised objective. Existing MORL methods cannot leverage these pre-trained `specialists' to learn Pareto fronts and avoid incurring the sample costs of retraining. We introduce Mixed Advantage Pareto Extraction (MAPEX), an offline MORL method that constructs a frontier of policies by reusing pre-trained specialist policies, critics, and replay buffers. MAPEX combines evaluations from specialist critics into a mixed advantage signal, and weights a behaviour cloning loss with it to train new policies that balance multiple objectives. MAPEX's post hoc Pareto front extraction preserves the simplicity of single-objective off-policy RL, and avoids retrofitting these algorithms into complex MORL frameworks. We formally describe the MAPEX procedure and evaluate MAPEX on five multi-objective MuJoCo environments. Given the same starting policies, MAPEX produces comparable fronts at $0.001\%$ the sample cost of established baselines.