45,916 research outputs found
Improving Exploration in Evolution Strategies for Deep Reinforcement Learning via a Population of Novelty-Seeking Agents
Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms
able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy
gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but
are much faster (e.g. hours vs. days) because they parallelize better. However,
many RL problems require directed exploration because they have reward
functions that are sparse or deceptive (i.e. contain local optima), and it is
unknown how to encourage such exploration with ES. Here we show that algorithms
that have been invented to promote directed exploration in small-scale evolved
neural networks via populations of exploring agents, specifically novelty
search (NS) and quality diversity (QD) algorithms, can be hybridized with ES to
improve its performance on sparse or deceptive deep RL tasks, while retaining
scalability. Our experiments confirm that the resultant new algorithms, NS-ES
and two QD algorithms, NSR-ES and NSRA-ES, avoid local optima encountered by ES
to achieve higher performance on Atari and simulated robots learning to walk
around a deceptive trap. This paper thus introduces a family of fast, scalable
algorithms for reinforcement learning that are capable of directed exploration.
It also adds this new family of exploration algorithms to the RL toolbox and
raises the interesting possibility that analogous algorithms with multiple
simultaneous paths of exploration might also combine well with existing RL
algorithms outside ES
Visual Imitation Learning with Recurrent Siamese Networks
It would be desirable for a reinforcement learning (RL) based agent to learn
behaviour by merely watching a demonstration. However, defining rewards that
facilitate this goal within the RL paradigm remains a challenge. Here we
address this problem with Siamese networks, trained to compute distances
between observed behaviours and the agent's behaviours. Given a desired motion
such Siamese networks can be used to provide a reward signal to an RL agent via
the distance between the desired motion and the agent's motion. We experiment
with an RNN-based comparator model that can compute distances in space and time
between motion clips while training an RL policy to minimize this distance.
Through experimentation, we have had also found that the inclusion of
multi-task data and an additional image encoding loss helps enforce the
temporal consistency. These two components appear to balance reward for
matching a specific instance of behaviour versus that behaviour in general.
Furthermore, we focus here on a particularly challenging form of this problem
where only a single demonstration is provided for a given task -- the one-shot
learning setting. We demonstrate our approach on humanoid agents in both 2D
with degrees of freedom (DoF) and 3D with DoF.Comment: PrePrin
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