{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/enhanced-meta-reinforcement-learning-using","title":"Enhanced Meta Reinforcement Learning using Demonstrations in Sparse Reward Environments","arxiv_id":"2209.13048","date":"2022-09-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Desik Rengarajan","Sapana Chaudhary","Jaewon Kim","Dileep Kalathil","Srinivas Shakkottai"],"abstract":"Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able to perform near-optimally on a new, related task. However, a major challenge to adopting this approach to solve real-world problems is that they are often associated with sparse reward functions that only indicate whether a task is completed partially or fully. We consider the situation where some data, possibly generated by a sub-optimal agent, is available for each task. We then develop a class of algorithms entitled Enhanced Meta-RL using Demonstrations (EMRLD) that exploit this information even if sub-optimal to obtain guidance during training. We show how EMRLD jointly utilizes RL and supervised learning over the offline data to generate a meta-policy that demonstrates monotone performance improvements. We also develop a warm started variant called EMRLD-WS that is particularly efficient for sub-optimal demonstration data. Finally, we show that our EMRLD algorithms significantly outperform existing approaches in a variety of sparse reward environments, including that of a mobile robot.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13048v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.13048v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"enhanced-meta-reinforcement-learning-using","repo_url":"https://github.com/desikrengarajan/emrld","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"meta-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Meta Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2209.13048","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}