about
Leave No Trace: Learning to Reset for Safe and Autonomous Reinforcement Learning (arxiv.org)
3 points by jonbaer on Nov 27, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The agent learns two jobs at once: doing the task and putting the environment back afterward. Because it knows which situations it can undo, it can stop before getting stuck, cutting how often a human must reset things and avoiding unrecoverable mistakes.

Abstract · Leave no Trace: Learning to Reset for Safe and Autonomous Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can learn complex behavioral skills, but real-world application of these methods requires a large amount of experience to be collected by the agent. In practical settings, such as robotics, this involves repeatedly attempting a task, resetting the environment between each attempt. However, not all tasks are easily or automatically reversible. In practice, this learning process requires extensive human intervention. In this work, we propose an autonomous method for safe and efficient reinforcement learning that simultaneously learns a forward and reset policy, with the reset policy resetting the environment for a subsequent attempt. By learning a value function for the reset policy, we can automatically determine when the forward policy is about to enter a non-reversible state, providing for uncertainty-aware safety aborts. Our experiments illustrate that proper use of the reset policy can greatly reduce the number of manual resets required to learn a task, can reduce the number of unsafe actions that lead to non-reversible states, and can automatically induce a curriculum.

Benjamin Eysenbach, Shixiang Gu, Julian Ibarz, Sergey Levine
arXiv:1711.06782 · cs.LG, cs.RO · submitted Nov 18, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · Videos of our experiments are available at: https://sites.google.com/site/mlleavenotrace/

add comment on HN