Generalization through Diversity: Improving Unsupervised Environment Design

Generalization through Diversity: Improving Unsupervised Environment Design

Wenjun Li, Pradeep Varakantham, Dexun Li

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 5411-5419. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/601

Agent decision making using Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on either a model or simulator of the environment (e.g., moving in an 8x8 maze with three rooms, playing Chess on an 8x8 board). Due to this dependence, small changes in the environment (e.g., positions of obstacles in the maze, size of the board) can severely affect the effectiveness of the policy learned by the agent. To that end, existing work has proposed training RL agents on an adaptive curriculum of environments (generated automatically) to improve performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) test scenarios. Specifically, existing research has employed the potential for the agent to learn in an environment (captured using Generalized Advantage Estimation, GAE) as the key factor to select the next environment(s) to train the agent. However, such a mechanism can select similar environments (with a high potential to learn) thereby making agent training redundant on all but one of those environments. To that end, we provide a principled approach to adaptively identify diverse environments based on a novel distance measure relevant to environment design. We empirically demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our method in comparison to multiple leading approaches for unsupervised environment design on three distinct benchmark problems used in literature.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Search in planning and scheduling
Machine Learning: ML: Deep reinforcement learning
Planning and Scheduling: PS: POMDPs