Papers › Continual Task Learning through Adaptive Policy Self-Composition

Continual Task Learning through Adaptive Policy Self-Composition

18 Nov 2024arXiv:2411.11364archive 2025-07-28

Shengchao Hu, YuHang Zhou, Ziqing Fan, Jifeng Hu, Li Shen, Ya zhang, DaCheng Tao

Training a generalizable agent to continually learn a sequence of tasks from offline trajectories is a natural requirement for long-lived agents, yet remains a significant challenge for current offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Specifically, an agent must be able to rapidly adapt to new tasks using newly collected trajectories (plasticity), while retaining knowledge from previously learned tasks (stability). However, systematic analyses of this setting are scarce, and it remains unclear whether conventional continual learning (CL) methods are effective in continual offline RL (CORL) scenarios. In this study, we develop the Offline Continual World benchmark and demonstrate that traditional CL methods struggle with catastrophic forgetting, primarily due to the unique distribution shifts inherent to CORL scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce CompoFormer, a structure-based continual transformer model that adaptively composes previous policies via a meta-policy network. Upon encountering a new task, CompoFormer leverages semantic correlations to selectively integrate relevant prior policies alongside newly trained parameters, thereby enhancing knowledge sharing and accelerating the learning process. Our experiments reveal that CompoFormer outperforms conventional CL methods, particularly in longer task sequences, showcasing a promising balance between plasticity and stability.

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charleshsc/CompoFormer officialmentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

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2ran · our draft was wrong
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init charleshsc/CompoFormer/dt/decision_transformer_grow.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · c00885ffa5fe61e7 · report
init_ charleshsc/CompoFormer/dt/decision_transformer_grow.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 748385c8184d4945 · report
simple_separated_format charleshsc/CompoFormer/tabulate.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5cb0c55f58279f59 · report
calculate_forgetting charleshsc/CompoFormer/dt/Metric.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e188fc03df97419f · report
calculate_mean_performance charleshsc/CompoFormer/dt/Metric.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 92aa145c46cc37fd · report
create_exp_name charleshsc/CompoFormer/logger.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5e687d63bb9beb4a · report
dict_to_safe_json charleshsc/CompoFormer/logger.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 41279dfcda8b39e4 · report
is_two_level_nested_list charleshsc/CompoFormer/dt/Metric.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 2be8b4822a8978c6 · report
load_tf_weights_in_gpt2 charleshsc/CompoFormer/dt/trajectory_gpt2.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 00a33466c69c5705 · report
prompt_evaluate_episode charleshsc/CompoFormer/dt/prompt_evaluate_episodes.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5025e676615b5431 · report
prompt_evaluate_episode_rtg charleshsc/CompoFormer/dt/prompt_evaluate_episodes.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b0b22be94dde9f35 · report
safe_json charleshsc/CompoFormer/logger.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 07afff96928bd142 · report

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Continual LearningOffline RLReinforcement Learning (RL)

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