Model-based Reinforcement Learning

Directly back-propagate into your policy network, from model jacobians calculated in MuJoCo using finite-difference.

To backprop into stochastic policies, given an unknown model, one has to use the REINFORCE theory, to be able to calculate the gradients by sampling the environment. These methods usually have high variance, so baselines and value/advantage functions were introduced. Another way to backpropagate into your policy network is to use the “reparameterization trick” as in VAEs, but they entail knowledge of upstream gradients, and hence a known model. The policy gradients calculated w/ the reparam trick are often much lower in variance, so one can go wo/ baselines and value networks. This project puts it all together: computation graph of policy and dynamics, upstream gradients from MuJoCo dynamics and rewards, reparam trick, and optimization.

Vanilla Computation Graph

     +----------+S0+----------+              +----------+S1+----------+
     |                        |              |                        |
     |    +------+   A0   +---v----+         +    +------+   A1   +---v----+
S0+------>+Policy+---+--->+Dynamics+---+---+S1+-->+Policy+---+--->+Dynamics+--->S2  ...
     |    +------+   |    +--------+   |     +    +------+   |    +--------+    |
     |               |                 |     |               |                  |
     |            +--v---+             |     |            +--v---+              |
     +---+S0+---->+Reward+<-----S1-----+     +---+S1+---->+Reward+<-----S2------+
                  +------+                                +------+

Results

This repo contains:

• Finite-difference calculation of MuJoCo dynamics jacobians in mujoco-py
• MuJoCo dynamics as a PyTorch Operation (i.e. forward and backward pass)
• Reward function PyTorch Operation
• Flexible design to wire up your own meta computation graph
• Trajectory Optimization module alongside Policy Networks
• Flexible design to define your own environment in gym
• Fancy logger and monitoring

Dependencies

Python3.6:

• torch
• mujoco-py
• gym
• numpy
• visdom

Other:

• Tested w/ mujoco200

Usage

For latest changes:

git clone -b development git@github.com:MahanFathi/Model-Based-RL.git

Run:

python3 main.py --config-file ./configs/inverted_pendulum.yaml