Learning Memory Mechanisms for Decision Making through Demonstrations

1University of Texas at Austin, 2Sony AI
ICLR NFAM 2025

Abstract

In Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, integrating an agent's history into memory poses a significant challenge for decision-making. Traditional imitation learning, relying on observation-action pairs for expert demonstrations, fails to capture the expert's memory mechanisms used in decision-making. To capture memory processes as demonstrations, we introduce the concept of memory dependency pairs (p,q) indicating that events at time p are recalled for decision-making at time q. We introduce AttentionTuner to leverage memory dependency pairs in Transformers and find significant improvements across several tasks compared to standard Transformers when evaluated on Memory Gym and the Long-term Memory Benchmark.

Video Presentation

ICLR Poster

BibTeX

@article{yue2024learning,
    title={Learning Memory Mechanisms for Decision Making through Demonstrations},
    author={Yue, William and Liu, Bo and Stone, Peter},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.07954},
    year={2024}
}