IR-VIC: Unsupervised Discovery of Sub-goals for Transfer in RL

Nirbhay Modhe, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Mohit Sharma, Abhishek Das, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Ramakrishna Vedantam

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Main track. Pages 2022-2028.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/280

PDF BibTeX Video

Abstract

We propose a novel framework to identify sub-goals useful for exploration in sequential decision making tasks under partial observability. We utilize the variational intrinsic control framework (Gregor et.al., 2016) which maximizes empowerment -- the ability to reliably reach a diverse set of states and show how to identify sub-goals as states with high necessary option information through an information theoretic regularizer. Despite being discovered without explicit goal supervision, our sub-goals provide better exploration and sample complexity on challenging grid-world navigation tasks compared to supervised counterparts in prior work.

Keywords

  • Machine Learning: Deep Reinforcement Learning
  • Machine Learning: Reinforcement Learning
  • Machine Learning: Unsupervised Learning
Welcome Future Conferences AI Journal Division IJCAI Proceedings Travel Grant Program IJCAI Awards