Using Contrastive Samples for Identifying and Leveraging Possible Causal Relationships in Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: A significant challenge in reinforcement learning is quantifying the complex relationship between actions and long-term rewards. The effects may manifest themselves over a long sequence of state-action pairs, making them hard to pinpoint. In this paper, we propose a method to link transitions with significant deviations in state with unusually large variations in subsequent rewards. Such transitions are marked as possible causal effects, and the corresponding state-action pairs are added to a separate replay buffer. In addition, we include \textit{contrastive} samples corresponding to transitions from a similar state but with differing actions. Including this Contrastive Experience Replay (CER) during training is shown to outperform standard value-based methods on 2D navigation tasks. We believe that CER can be useful for a broad class of learning tasks, including for any off-policy reinforcement learning algorithm.