Reinforcement Learning Journal, vol. 1, 2024, pp. 130–157.
Presented at the Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC), Amherst Massachusetts, August 9–12, 2024.
$Q$-learning algorithms are appealing for real-world applications due to their data- efficiency, but they are very prone to overfitting and training instabilities when trained from visual observations. Prior work, namely SVEA, finds that selective application of data augmentation can improve the visual generalization of RL agents without destabilizing training. We revisit its recipe for data augmentation, and find an assumption that limits its effectiveness to augmentations of a photometric nature. Addressing these limitations, we propose a generalized recipe, SADA, that works with wider varieties of augmentations. We benchmark its effectiveness on DMC-GB2 – our proposed extension of the popular DMControl Generalization Benchmark – as well as tasks from Meta-World and the Distracting Control Suite, and find that our method, SADA, greatly improves training stability and generalization of RL agents across a diverse set of augmentations. Visualizations, code and benchmark available at: https://aalmuzairee.github.io/SADA
Abdulaziz Almuzairee, Nicklas Hansen, and Henrik I Christensen. "A Recipe for Unbounded Data Augmentation in Visual Reinforcement Learning." Reinforcement Learning Journal, vol. 1, 2024, pp. 130–157.
BibTeX:@article{almuzairee2024recipe,
title={A Recipe for Unbounded Data Augmentation in Visual Reinforcement Learning},
author={Almuzairee, Abdulaziz and Hansen, Nicklas and Christensen, Henrik I},
journal={Reinforcement Learning Journal},
volume={1},
pages={130--157},
year={2024}
}