/fractal_rl

Code for CORL 2020 paper: Explicitly Encouraging Low Fractional Dimensional Trajectories Via Reinforcement Learning.

Primary LanguageJupyter Notebook

Shrinking Fractional Dimensions With Reinforcement Learning For Fun and Profit.

This repo contains code to accompany the CORL 2020 paper: Explicitly Encouraging Low Fractional Dimensional Trajectories Via Reinforcement Learning. The root directory contains the original manuscript as a pdf, a short video, and the source code to replicate the results found in the paper.

In this paper, we introduce a method to incorporate a measure of fractal dimensionality into the reward function of a reinforcement learning agent. This allows us to use any on-policy RL algorithm to search for policies which induce trajectories with a small fractal dimension. Agents which produce lower dimensional trajectories are more amendable to so called mesh based analysis (see follow up work here: https://github.com/sgillen/fractal_mesh), which is a step towards making empirical guarantees for RL agents. We also observed the resulting agents were more robust to push disturbances and noise.

The source code contains a modified implementation of Augmented Random Search which modifies rewards obtained from reinforcement learning environments in order to explicitly encourage agents to find policies which induce trajectories with a small fractional dimension. There are also notebooks which analyze the resulting policies.