Instructing Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Agents with Temporal Logic Objectives

Wenjie Qiu, Wensen Mao, He Zhu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for learning general-purpose skills by reaching diverse goals. However, it has limitations when it comes to task-conditioned policies, where goals are specified by temporally extended instructions written in the Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formal language. Existing approaches for finding LTL-satisfying policies rely on sampling a large set of LTL instructions during training to adapt to unseen tasks at inference time. However, these approaches do not guarantee generalization to out-of-distribution LTL objectives, which may have increased complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address this challenge. We show that simple goal-conditioned RL agents can be instructed to follow arbitrary LTL specifications without additional training over the LTL task space. Unlike existing approaches that focus on LTL specifications expressible as regular expressions, our technique is unrestricted and generalizes to ω-regular expressions. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in adapting goal-conditioned RL agents to satisfy complex temporal logic task specifications zero-shot.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 - 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023
EditorsA. Oh, T. Neumann, A. Globerson, K. Saenko, M. Hardt, S. Levine
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
ISBN (Electronic)9781713899921
StatePublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes
Event37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: Dec 10 2023Dec 16 2023

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume36

Conference

Conference37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period12/10/2312/16/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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