Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models
Ramanan Sekar, Oleh Rybkin, Kostas Daniilidis, Pieter Abbeel, Danijar Hafner, Deepak Pathak
Abstract
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 exploration and fast adaptation to new tasks, which need not be known during exploration. During exploration, unlike prior methods which retrospectively compute the novelty of observations after the agent has already reached them, our agent acts efficiently by leveraging planning to seek out expected future novelty. After exploration, the agent quickly adapts to multiple downstream tasks in a zero or a few-shot manner. We evaluate on challenging control tasks from high-dimensional image inputs. Without any training supervision or task-specific interaction, Plan2Explore outperforms prior self-supervised exploration methods, and in fact, almost matches the performances oracle which has access to rewards. Videos and code: https://ramanans1.github.io/plan2explore/
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v119-sekar20a,
title = {Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models},
author = {Sekar, Ramanan and Rybkin, Oleh and Daniilidis, Kostas and Abbeel, Pieter and Hafner, Danijar and Pathak, Deepak},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {8583--8592},
year = {2020},
editor = {III, Hal Daumé and Singh, Aarti},
volume = {119},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {13--18 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/sekar20a/sekar20a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/sekar20a.html},
abstract = {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 exploration and fast adaptation to new tasks, which need not be known during exploration. During exploration, unlike prior methods which retrospectively compute the novelty of observations after the agent has already reached them, our agent acts efficiently by leveraging planning to seek out expected future novelty. After exploration, the agent quickly adapts to multiple downstream tasks in a zero or a few-shot manner. We evaluate on challenging control tasks from high-dimensional image inputs. Without any training supervision or task-specific interaction, Plan2Explore outperforms prior self-supervised exploration methods, and in fact, almost matches the performances oracle which has access to rewards. Videos and code: https://ramanans1.github.io/plan2explore/}
}