Unsupervised Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning via Functional Reward Encodings

Abstract

Can we pre-train a generalist agent from a large amount of unlabeled offline trajectories such that it can be immediately adapted to any new downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner? In this work, we present a *functional* reward encoding (FRE) as a general, scalable solution to this *zero-shot RL* problem. Our main idea is to learn functional representations of any arbitrary tasks by encoding their state-reward samples using a transformer-based variational auto-encoder. This functional encoding not only enables the pre-training of an agent from a wide diversity of general unsupervised reward functions, but also provides a way to solve any new downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner, given a small number of reward-annotated samples. We empirically show that FRE agents trained on diverse random unsupervised reward functions can generalize to solve novel tasks in a range of simulated robotic benchmarks, often outperforming previous zero-shot RL and offline RL methods.