All You Need Is Supervised Learning: From Imitation Learning to Meta-RL With Upside Down RL

Kai Arulkumaran, Dylan R. Ashley, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Rupesh K. Srivastava

Published 2022-02-24Version 1

Upside down reinforcement learning (UDRL) flips the conventional use of the return in the objective function in RL upside down, by taking returns as input and predicting actions. UDRL is based purely on supervised learning, and bypasses some prominent issues in RL: bootstrapping, off-policy corrections, and discount factors. While previous work with UDRL demonstrated it in a traditional online RL setting, here we show that this single algorithm can also work in the imitation learning and offline RL settings, be extended to the goal-conditioned RL setting, and even the meta-RL setting. With a general agent architecture, a single UDRL agent can learn across all paradigms.