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Decision Transformer: ReinforcementLearning via Sequence Modeling (arxiv.org)
1 point by brofallon on Jun 10, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of learning value functions or policy gradients, this system feeds past states, actions, and a target reward as a sequence and predicts the next action like a language model. It matched or beat top offline reinforcement learning methods on Atari, Gym, and Key-to-Door tasks.

Abstract · Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling

We introduce a framework that abstracts Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a sequence modeling problem. This allows us to draw upon the simplicity and scalability of the Transformer architecture, and associated advances in language modeling such as GPT-x and BERT. In particular, we present Decision Transformer, an architecture that casts the problem of RL as conditional sequence modeling. Unlike prior approaches to RL that fit value functions or compute policy gradients, Decision Transformer simply outputs the optimal actions by leveraging a causally masked Transformer. By conditioning an autoregressive model on the desired return (reward), past states, and actions, our Decision Transformer model can generate future actions that achieve the desired return. Despite its simplicity, Decision Transformer matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art model-free offline RL baselines on Atari, OpenAI Gym, and Key-to-Door tasks.

Lili Chen, Kevin Lu, Aravind Rajeswaran, Kimin Lee, Aditya Grover, Michael Laskin, Pieter Abbeel, Aravind Srinivas, Igor Mordatch
arXiv:2106.01345 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Jun 2, 2021 · updated Jun 24, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · First two authors contributed equally. Last two authors advised equally

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Also discussed: Nov 2022 (2 points, 1 comment)