Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) provides an attractive approach for learning control policies directly in high dimensional state spaces. However, many goal-oriented tasks involving sparse rewards remain difficult to solve with state-of-the-art model-free RL algorithms, even in simulation. One of the key difficulties is that deep RL, due to its relatively poor sample complexity, often requires a prohibitive number of trials to obtain a learning signal. We propose a novel, non-sparse reward function for robotic RL tasks by leveraging physical priors in the form of a time-to-reach (TTR) function computed from an approximate system dynamics model. TTR functions come from the optimal control field and measure the minimal time required to move from any state to the goal. However, TTR functions are intractable to compute for complex systems, so we compute it in a lower-dimensional state space, and then do a simple transformation to convert it into a TTR-based reward function for the MDP in RL tasks. Our TTR-based reward function provides highly-informative rewards that account for system dynamics.
Exploration inefficiency, as the root cause of high sample complexity, remains a major challenge in RL @cite_29 . "Deep exploration" strategy address this problem by maintaining a distribution over possible values and bootstrapping from it with random initialization @cite_29 . Curriculum-based approaches paved another possible path by first training on easier sub-problems, and increasing the difficulty of sub-problems as training progresses until the original task becomes appropriate to train on directly @cite_17 . Hierarchical RL framework tries to improve exploration efficiency by build modules with different level, where top-level module learns a policy over options (subgoals) and the bottom-level module learns policies to accomplish the objective of each option @cite_35 @cite_14 @cite_34 .
@cite_35 @cite_14 @cite_29 @cite_34 @cite_17
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Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical applications of RL involve learning more than a single task, and prior tasks can be used to inform how exploration should be performed in new tasks. In this work, we study how prior tasks can inform an agent about how to explore effectively in new situations. We introduce a novel gradient-based fast adaptation algorithm -- model agnostic exploration with structured noise (MAESN) -- to learn exploration strategies from prior experience. The prior experience is used both to initialize a policy and to acquire a latent exploration space that can inject structured stochasticity into a policy, producing exploration strategies that are informed by prior knowledge and are more effective than random action-space noise. We show that MAESN is more effective at learning exploration strategies when compared to prior meta-RL methods, RL without learned exploration strategies, and task-agnostic exploration methods. We evaluate our method on a variety of simulated tasks: locomotion with a wheeled robot, locomotion with a quadrupedal walker, and object manipulation. Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many of the current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical applications of RL involve learning more than a single task, and prior tasks can be used to inform how exploration should be performed in new tasks. In this work, we explore how prior tasks can inform an agent about how to explore effectively in new situations. We introduce a novel gradient-based fast adaptation algorithm -- model agnostic exploration with structured noise (MAESN) -- to learn exploration strategies from prior experience. The prior experience is used both to initialize a policy and to acquire a latent exploration space that can inject structured stochasticity into a policy, producing exploration strategies that are informed by prior knowledge and are more effective than random action-space noise. We show that MAESN is more effective at learning exploration strategies when compared to prior meta-RL methods, RL without learned exploration strategies, and task-agnostic exploration methods. We evaluate our method on a variety of simulated tasks: locomotion with a wheeled robot, locomotion with a quadrupedal walker, and object manipulation. This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward landscape, which is ineffective in high dimensional spaces with sparse rewards. We propose a more directed exploration strategy that promotes exploration of under-appreciated reward regions. An action sequence is considered under-appreciated if its log-probability under the current policy under-estimates its resulting reward. The proposed exploration strategy is easy to implement, requiring small modifications to an implementation of the REINFORCE algorithm. We evaluate the approach on a set of algorithmic tasks that have long challenged RL methods. Our approach reduces hyper-parameter sensitivity and demonstrates significant improvements over baseline methods. Our algorithm successfully solves a benchmark multi-digit addition task and generalizes to long sequences. This is, to our knowledge, the first time that a pure RL method has solved addition using only reward feedback. Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal performance. However, finding a non-zero reward is exponentially more difficult with increasing task horizon or action dimensionality. This puts many real-world tasks out of practical reach of RL methods. In this work, we use demonstrations to overcome the exploration problem and successfully learn to perform long-horizon, multi-step robotics tasks with continuous control such as stacking blocks with a robot arm. Our method, which builds on top of Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients and Hindsight Experience Replay, provides an order of magnitude of speedup over RL on simulated robotics tasks. It is simple to implement and makes only the additional assumption that we can collect a small set of demonstrations. Furthermore, our method is able to solve tasks not solvable by either RL or behavior cloning alone, and often ends up outperforming the demonstrator policy.