Flow-based Intrinsic Curiosity Module

Flow-based Intrinsic Curiosity Module

Hsuan-Kung Yang, Po-Han Chiang, Min-Fong Hong, Chun-Yi Lee

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2065-2072. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/286

In this paper, we focus on a prediction-based novelty estimation strategy upon the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, and present a flow-based intrinsic curiosity module (FICM) to exploit the prediction errors from optical flow estimation as exploration bonuses. We propose the concept of leveraging motion features captured between consecutive observations to evaluate the novelty of observations in an environment. FICM encourages a DRL agent to explore observations with unfamiliar motion features, and requires only two consecutive frames to obtain sufficient information when estimating the novelty. We evaluate our method and compare it with a number of existing methods on multiple benchmark environments, including Atari games, Super Mario Bros., and ViZDoom. We demonstrate that FICM is favorable to tasks or environments featuring moving objects, which allow FICM to utilize the motion features between consecutive observations. We further ablatively analyze the encoding efficiency of FICM, and discuss its applicable domains comprehensively. See here for our codes and demo videos.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Deep Reinforcement Learning
Machine Learning Applications: Game Playing
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Reinforcement Learning