392 research outputs found
Generating Behaviorally Diverse Policies with Latent Diffusion Models
Recent progress in Quality Diversity Reinforcement Learning (QD-RL) has
enabled learning a collection of behaviorally diverse, high performing
policies. However, these methods typically involve storing thousands of
policies, which results in high space-complexity and poor scaling to additional
behaviors. Condensing the archive into a single model while retaining the
performance and coverage of the original collection of policies has proved
challenging. In this work, we propose using diffusion models to distill the
archive into a single generative model over policy parameters. We show that our
method achieves a compression ratio of 13x while recovering 98% of the original
rewards and 89% of the original coverage. Further, the conditioning mechanism
of diffusion models allows for flexibly selecting and sequencing behaviors,
including using language. Project website:
https://sites.google.com/view/policydiffusion/hom
Learning to Walk Autonomously via Reset-Free Quality-Diversity
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms can discover large and complex behavioural
repertoires consisting of both diverse and high-performing skills. However, the
generation of behavioural repertoires has mainly been limited to simulation
environments instead of real-world learning. This is because existing QD
algorithms need large numbers of evaluations as well as episodic resets, which
require manual human supervision and interventions. This paper proposes
Reset-Free Quality-Diversity optimization (RF-QD) as a step towards autonomous
learning for robotics in open-ended environments. We build on Dynamics-Aware
Quality-Diversity (DA-QD) and introduce a behaviour selection policy that
leverages the diversity of the imagined repertoire and environmental
information to intelligently select of behaviours that can act as automatic
resets. We demonstrate this through a task of learning to walk within defined
training zones with obstacles. Our experiments show that we can learn full
repertoires of legged locomotion controllers autonomously without manual resets
with high sample efficiency in spite of harsh safety constraints. Finally,
using an ablation of different target objectives, we show that it is important
for RF-QD to have diverse types solutions available for the behaviour selection
policy over solutions optimised with a specific objective. Videos and code
available at https://sites.google.com/view/rf-qd
What is Cultural Science? (And what it is not.)
Hartley and Potts (2014) argue that cultural science represents a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of cultural structure, dynamics and use. We explain how this differs from the extant analytic frameworks of cultural studies, both as a research program and as a policy platform. The central idea is to reconceptualize what culture is, through a reinterpretation of what culture does. We argue that the semiotic productivity of culture makes groups – which we call demes – and demes make knowledge (what we call the externalism hypothesis); and the interaction of demes makes newness – new knowledge. Cultural science, then, is a new model of the cultural processes involved in socio-economic evolution and innovation of knowledge-making demes. The paper is in three sections, the first on the exhaustion of cultural studies; the second on the emergence of cultural science; and the third on some implications for cultural policy – illustrated by reference to Matthew Arnold’s policy on language preservation
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