Maximum entropy gain exploration for long horizon multi-goal reinforcement learning

Silviu Pitis*, Harris Chan, Stephen Zhao, Bradly Stadie, Jimmy Ba

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

What goals should a multi-goal reinforcement learning agent pursue during training in long-horizon tasks? When the desired (test time) goal distribution is too distant to offer a useful learning signal, we argue that the agent should not pursue unobtainable goals. Instead, it should set its own intrinsic goals that maximize the entropy of the historical achieved goal distribution. We propose to optimize this objective by having the agent pursue past achieved goals in sparsely explored areas of the goal space, which focuses exploration on the frontier of the achievable goal set. We show that our strategy achieves an order of magnitude better sample efficiency than the prior state of the art on long-horizon multi-goal tasks including maze navigation and block stacking.1

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
EditorsHal Daume, Aarti Singh
PublisherInternational Machine Learning Society (IMLS)
Pages7706-7717
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781713821120
StatePublished - 2020
Event37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jul 13 2020Jul 18 2020

Publication series

Name37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
VolumePartF168147-10

Conference

Conference37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/13/207/18/20

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Software

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