Continual Learning of Control Primitives: Skill Discovery via Reset-Games

By Kelvin Xu, Siddharth Verma, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine. 2020

36 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reinforcement learning has the potential to automate the acquisition of behavior in complex settings, but in order for it to be successfully deployed, a number of practical challenges must be addressed. First, in real world settings, when an agent attempts a task and fails, the environment must somehow "reset" so that the agent can attempt the task again. While easy in simulation, this could require considerable human effort in the real world, especially if the number of trials is very large. Second, real world learning often involves complex, temporally extended behavior that is often difficult to acquire with random exploration. While these two problems may at first appear unrelated, in this work, we show how a single method can allow an agent to acquire skills with minimal supervision while removing the need for resets. We do this by exploiting the insight that the need to "reset" an agent to a broad set of initial states for a learning task provides a natural setting to learn a diverse set of "reset-skills". We propose a general-sum game formulation that balances the objectives of resetting and learning skills, and demonstrate that this approach improves performance on reset-free tasks, and additionally show that the skills we obtain can be used to significantly accelerate downstream learning.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Reinforcement Learning, Meta & Continual Learning

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

In Reinforcement Learning

In Meta & Continual Learning

Citations in the corpus

A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application (2023, background): “MBPA++ [442], EMAR [465], DnR [396], ARPER [298], Total Recall [253]), generative replay (PAGeR [415], LAMOL [395], ACM [499], NER [434]), parameter allocation (TPEM [131]), modular network (ProgModel [377]), meta-learning (MetaMBPA++ [442], MeLL [422], CML [455]), etc.”
How to Reuse and Compose Knowledge for a Lifetime of Tasks: A Survey on Continual Learning and Functional Composition (2022, background): “A more recent approach learns latent skills that enable the agent to reset itself in the environment in a way that encourages exploration (Xu et al., 2020).”