Policy Learning Using Weak Supervision

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021
Weak supervision signals are everywhere! We provide a unified formulation of the weakly supervised policy learning problems. We also propose PeerPL, a new way to perform policy evaluation under weak supervision.


News



Abstract

Most existing policy learning solutions require the learning agents to receive high-quality supervision signals such as well-designed rewards in reinforcement learning (RL) or high-quality expert demonstrations in behavioral cloning (BC). These quality supervisions are usually infeasible or prohibitively expensive to obtain in practice. We aim for a unified framework that leverages the available cheap weak supervisions to perform policy learning efficiently. To handle this problem, we treat the "weak supervision" as imperfect information coming from a peer agent, and evaluate the learning agent's policy based on a "correlated agreement" with the peer agent's policy (instead of simple agreements). Our approach explicitly punishes a policy for overfitting to the weak supervision. In addition to theoretical guarantees, extensive evaluations on tasks including RL with noisy rewards, BC with weak demonstrations, and standard policy co-training show that our method leads to substantial performance improvements, especially when the complexity or the noise of the learning environments is high.


PeerPL with Correlated Agreement
Results
PeerPL can also be plugged in DAgger!

Citation
BibTeX
@inproceedings{wang2021policy,
title     = {Policy Learning Using Weak Supervision},
author    = {Jingkang Wang and Hongyi Guo and Zhaowei Zhu and Yang Liu},
booktitle = {Thirty-Fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year      = {2021},
url       = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=UZgQhsTYe3R}
}
Text citation

Jingkang Wang, Hongyi Guo, Zhaowei Zhu and Yang Liu. Policy Learning Using Weak Supervision. In Thirty-Fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021.


Past Works
@inproceedings{liu2020peer,
title     = {Peer Loss Functions: Learning from Noisy Labels without Knowing Noise Rates},
author    = {Yang Liu and Hongyi Guo},
booktitle = {Thirty-Seventh International Conference on Machine Learning},
year      = {2020},
}
@inproceedings{wang2020reinforcement,
title     = {Reinforcement Learning with Perturbed Rewards},
author    = {Jingkang Wang and Yang Liu and Bo Li},
booktitle = {Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
year      = {2020},
}