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Poster

Breaking the Multi-Task Barrier in Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Transformers

Jake Grigsby · Justin Sasek · Samyak Parajuli · Ikechukwu D. Adebi · Amy Zhang · Yuke Zhu


Abstract:

Language models trained on diverse datasets unlock generalization by in-context learning. Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies can achieve a similar effect by meta-learning within the memory of a sequence model. However, meta-RL research primarily focuses on adapting to minor variations of a single task. It is difficult to scale towards more general behavior without confronting challenges in multi-task optimization, but few solutions are compatible with meta-RL's goal of learning from large training sets of unlabeled tasks. To address this challenge, we revisit the idea that multi-task RL is bottlenecked by imbalanced training losses created by uneven return scales across different tasks. We build upon recent advancements in Transformer-based (in-context) meta-RL and evaluate a simple yet scalable solution where both an agent's actor and critic objectives are converted to classification terms that decouple optimization from the current scale of returns. Large-scale comparisons in Meta-World ML45, Multi-Game Procgen, and Multi-Task POPGym find that this design unlocks significant progress in online multi-task adaptation and memory problems without explicit task labels.

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