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Danijar Hafner

23 accepted papers

2024

Learning to Model the World With Language

ICML 2024oral

To interact with humans and act in the world, agents need to understand the range of language that people use and relate it to the visual world. While current agents can learn to execute simple language instructions, we aim to build agents that leverage diverse language---language like "this button…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar
2023

Temporally Consistent Transformers for Video Generation

ICML 2023poster

To generate accurate videos, algorithms have to understand the spatial and temporal dependencies in the world. Current algorithms enable accurate predictions over short horizons but tend to suffer from temporal inconsistencies. When generated content goes out of view and is later revisited, the mode…

2023

Video Prediction Models as Rewards for Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Specifying reward signals that allow agents to learn complex behaviors is a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning. A promising approach is to extract preferences for behaviors from unlabeled videos, which are widely available on the internet. We present Video Prediction Rewards (VIPER),…

Cited by 67SourcePDFScholar
2022

DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning

CoRL 2022poster

To solve tasks in complex environments, robots need to learn from experience. Deep reinforcement learning is a common approach to robot learning but requires a large amount of trial and error to learn, limiting its deployment in the physical world. As a consequence, many advances in robot learning r…

Cited by 328SourcecodeScholar
2022

Learning Robust Dynamics through Variational Sparse Gating

NeurIPS 2022accept

Learning world models from their sensory inputs enables agents to plan for actions by imagining their future outcomes. World models have previously been shown to improve sample-efficiency in simulated environments with few objects, but have not yet been applied successfully to environments with many…

2022

Masked World Models for Visual Control

CoRL 2022poster

Visual model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable sample-efficient robot learning from visual observations. Yet the current approaches typically train a single model end-to-end for learning both visual representations and dynamics, making it difficult to accurately model the…

Cited by 157SourceScholar
2021

Discovering and Achieving Goals via World Models

NeurIPS 2021poster

How can artificial agents learn to solve many diverse tasks in complex visual environments without any supervision? We decompose this question into two challenges: discovering new goals and learning to reliably achieve them. Our proposed agent, Latent Explorer Achiever (LEXA), addresses both challen…

2021

Information is Power: Intrinsic Control via Information Capture

NeurIPS 2021poster

Humans and animals explore their environment and acquire useful skills even in the absence of clear goals, exhibiting intrinsic motivation. The study of intrinsic motivation in artificial agents is concerned with the following question: what is a good general-purpose objective for an agent? We study…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2021

Latent Skill Planning for Exploration and Transfer

ICLR 2021poster

To quickly solve new tasks in complex environments, intelligent agents need to build up reusable knowledge. For example, a learned world model captures knowledge about the environment that applies to new tasks. Similarly, skills capture general behaviors that can apply to new tasks. In this paper, w…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2021

Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models

ICLR 2021poster

Intelligent agents need to generalize from past experience to achieve goals in complex environments. World models facilitate such generalization and allow learning behaviors from imagined outcomes to increase sample-efficiency. While learning world models from image inputs has recently become feasib…

2020

Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination

ICLR 2020spotlight

Learned world models summarize an agent's experience to facilitate learning complex behaviors. While learning world models from high-dimensional sensory inputs is becoming feasible through deep learning, there are many potential ways for deriving behaviors from them. We present Dreamer, a reinforcem…

Cited by 1635SourcecodeScholar
2020

Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models

ICML 2020poster

Reinforcement learning allows solving complex tasks, however, the learning tends to be task-specific and the sample efficiency remains a challenge. We present Plan2Explore, a self-supervised reinforcement learning agent that tackles both these challenges through a new approach to self-supervised exp…

2019

Bayesian Layers: A Module for Neural Network Uncertainty

NeurIPS 2019poster

We describe Bayesian Layers, a module designed for fast experimentation with neural network uncertainty. It extends neural network libraries with drop-in replacements for common layers. This enables composition via a unified abstraction over deterministic and stochastic functions and allows for scal…

2019

Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels

ICML 2019oral

Planning has been very successful for control tasks with known environment dynamics. To leverage planning in unknown environments, the agent needs to learn the dynamics from interactions with the world. However, learning dynamics models that are accurate enough for planning has been a long-standing…

2019

Noise Contrastive Priors for Functional Uncertainty

UAI 2019poster

Obtaining reliable uncertainty estimates of neural network predictions is a long standing challenge. Bayesian neural networks have been proposed as a solution, but it remains open how to specify their prior. In particular, the common practice of an independent normal prior in weight space imposes re…

2018

Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic Ensemble Value Expansion

NeurIPS 2018oral

There is growing interest in combining model-free and model-based approaches in reinforcement learning with the goal of achieving the high performance of model-free algorithms with low sample complexity. This is difficult because an imperfect dynamics model can degrade the performance of the learnin…

2018

Sim-to-Real: Learning Agile Locomotion For Quadruped Robots

RSS 2018poster

Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can learn quadruped locomotion from scratch using simple reward s…

Cited by 992SourcePDFScholar
2017

Learning Hierarchical Information Flow with Recurrent Neural Modules

NeurIPS 2017poster

We propose ThalNet, a deep learning model inspired by neocortical communication via the thalamus. Our model consists of recurrent neural modules that send features through a routing center, endowing the modules with the flexibility to share features over multiple time steps. We show that our model l…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar