A grand challenge in reinforcement learning is intelligent exploration, especially when rewards are sparse or deceptive. Two Atari games serve as benchmarks for such hard-exploration domains: Montezuma's Revenge and Pitfall. On both games, current RL algorithms perform poorly, even those with intrinsic motivation, whic…
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32 results for “hard-exploration”
APT-Gen generates tasks to help RL learn in hard problems.
problem Learning in hard exploration problems.
method APT-Gen uses a task generator to create tasks from a parameterized space, balancing performance and similarity to target tasks.
result APT-Gen outperforms baselines in grid world and robotic manipulation tasks.
GE finds failures in autonomous systems without domain heuristics.
problem Finding failures in autonomous systems without domain-specific heuristics.
method Adaptive stress testing using go-explore (GE) algorithm.
result GE finds failures in scenarios other RL techniques cannot solve.
Deep reinforcement learning methods traditionally struggle with tasks where environment rewards are particularly sparse. One successful method of guiding exploration in these domains is to imitate trajectories provided by a human demonstrator. However, these demonstrations are typically collected under artificial condi…
This paper proposes Self-Imitation Learning (SIL), a simple off-policy actor-critic algorithm that learns to reproduce the agent's past good decisions. This algorithm is designed to verify our hypothesis that exploiting past good experiences can indirectly drive deep exploration. Our empirical results show that SIL sig…
We propose a reinforcement learning agent to solve hard exploration games by learning a range of directed exploratory policies. We construct an episodic memory-based intrinsic reward using k-nearest neighbors over the agent's recent experience to train the directed exploratory policies, thereby encouraging the agent to…
Curriculum learning speeds up agent learning in Minecraft, a complex visual domain.
problem Training agents to learn multiple tasks in a complex, visual domain.
method Learning-progress based curriculum and dynamic exploration bonuses.
result Curriculum learning improves agent performance in a complex reinforcement learning problem.
Our work is a simple extension of the paper "Exploration by Random Network Distillation". More in detail, we show how to efficiently combine Intrinsic Rewards with Experience Replay in order to achieve more efficient and robust exploration (with respect to PPO/RND) and consequently better results in terms of agent perf…
Researchers improved Minecraft game performance using imitation learning.
problem Achieving state-of-the-art performance in immersive environments like Minecraft.
method Applied imitation learning to Minecraft, optimizing network architecture, loss function, and data augmentation.
result Reported stronger results than previous experiments, reaching second place in a competition.
We study the exploration problem in episodic MDPs with rich observations generated from a small number of latent states. Under certain identifiability assumptions, we demonstrate how to estimate a mapping from the observations to latent states inductively through a sequence of regression and clustering steps -- where p…
How to best explore in domains with sparse, delayed, and deceptive rewards is an important open problem for reinforcement learning (RL). This paper considers one such domain, the recently-proposed multi-agent benchmark of Pommerman. This domain is very challenging for RL --- past work has shown that model-free RL algor…
Proposes EVE for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning.
problem Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning.
method EVE: a recipe for posterior over parameters, facilitating efficient exploration.
result Competitive performance on benchmarks, efficient exploration confirmed.
We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods that is easy to implement and adds minimal overhead to the computation performed. The bonus is the error of a neural network predicting features of the observations given by a fixed randomly initialized neural network. We also introduce a method …
HyperAgent improves RL exploration in large-scale problems.
problem Efficient exploration in large-scale reinforcement learning problems.
method Hypermodel framework for incremental posterior approximation without conjugacy.
result HyperAgent achieves logarithmic per-step computational complexity and sublinear regret.
New framework uses unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in RL.
problem Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning with rich observations.
method Combines unsupervised learning and no-regret RL algorithms.
result Proves sample complexity for finding near-optimal policies.
RECODE uses clustering and embedding to track state visitation counts in RL.
problem Efficient novelty-based exploration in nonstationary RL environments.
method Non-parametric clustering, online density estimation, inverse dynamics loss.
result RECODE achieves state-of-the-art performance in challenging RL tasks.
Novelty search in low-dimensional space improves sample efficiency in exploration tasks.
problem Efficient exploration in complex environments with sparse rewards.
method Combines model-based and model-free objectives to learn a low-dimensional representation. Uses intrinsic novelty rewards based on nearest neighbor distances in this space.
result Our approach achieves more sample-efficient exploration compared to strong baselines on various tasks.
We propose a reinforcement learning framework for discrete environments in which an agent makes both strategic and tactical decisions. The former manifests itself through the use of value function, while the latter is powered by a tree search planner. These tools complement each other. The planning module performs a lo…
Hyper addresses the hyperparameter tuning challenge in RL, improving exploration efficiency and robustness.
problem Hyperparameter tuning is a significant challenge in RL, especially for curiosity-based exploration methods.
method Hyper robustly explores by effectively regularizing exploration visits and decoupling exploitation.
result Hyper is provably efficient and robust in various RL environments.
A method for self-supervised representation learning in partially observable environments.
problem Sparse rewards and stochasticity in partially observable environments.
method World model in latent space for estimating missing information.
result Significant improvement in exploration compared to prior work.
We consider the generic approach of using an experience memory to help exploration by adapting a restart distribution. That is, given the capacity to reset the state with those corresponding to the agent's past observations, we help exploration by promoting faster state-space coverage via restarting the agent from a mo…
BYOL-Explore learns to explore visually-rich environments by predicting world dynamics.
problem Exploration in visually complex environments.
method Optimizes a single prediction loss in latent space to learn world representation, dynamics, and exploration policy.
result Achieves superhuman performance on Atari games with simpler design.
An agent learning through interactions should balance its action selection process between probing the environment to discover new rewards and using the information acquired in the past to adopt useful behaviour. This trade-off is usually obtained by perturbing either the agent's actions (e.g., e-greedy or Gibbs sampli…
We propose a new method for learning from a single demonstration to solve hard exploration tasks like the Atari game Montezuma's Revenge. Instead of imitating human demonstrations, as proposed in other recent works, our approach is to maximize rewards directly. Our agent is trained using off-the-shelf reinforcement lea…
What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum number of steps (fast mixing), in order to ease efficient learning of any goal-…
AGAC uses an adversary to enhance exploration in complex tasks.
problem Sample inefficiency in complex environments, especially in tasks requiring efficient exploration.
method Integrates an adversary into the actor-critic framework to encourage innovative exploration strategies.
result AGAC leads to more exhaustive exploration and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
This paper provides an empirical evaluation of recently developed exploration algorithms within the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We study the use of different reward bonuses that incentives exploration in reinforcement learning. We do so by fixing the learning algorithm used and focusing only on the impact of the…
PBCS combines RL and motion planning for better exploration.
problem RL algorithms struggle with versatile exploration in complex environments.
method PBCS uses motion planning to find a good trajectory, then trains RL on a curriculum derived from it.
result PBCS outperforms state-of-the-art RL algorithms in 2D maze environments.
Optimistic initialisation is an effective strategy for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular case, all provably efficient model-free algorithms rely on it. However, model-free deep RL algorithms do not use optimistic initialisation despite taking inspiration from these provably efficient …
A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek novel states, driving the agent to discover improved reward. However, while state-…
Proposes a method to enhance exploration in RL using temporal difference uncertainties.
problem Challenges in estimating uncertainty in non-tabular reinforcement learning settings.
method Estimates uncertainty over value function using temporal difference errors and incorporates it as an intrinsic reward.
result Demonstrates improved exploration in various tasks, including Deep Sea and Atari 2600 environments.
New method uses hindsight to make exploration robust in stochastic environments.
problem Exploration in sparse-reward or reward-free environments, especially in stochastic settings.
method Learn representations of the future that capture unpredictable aspects, using them to predict and reward only the predictable parts of the world.
result Improves exploration in Atari games and Montezuma's Revenge, robust to stochasticity.