In plain words: The system learns compact descriptions of states and action sequences by predicting what happens next, capturing how the world changes. With these, an agent that normally learns only from trial-and-error rewards reached good pixel-based control in 1-2 million steps.
Abstract · Dynamics-aware Embeddings
In this paper we consider self-supervised representation learning to improve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a forward prediction objective for simultaneously learning embeddings of states and action sequences. These embeddings capture the structure of the environment's dynamics, enabling efficient policy learning. We demonstrate that our action embeddings alone improve the sample efficiency and peak performance of model-free RL on control from low-dimensional states. By combining state and action embeddings, we achieve efficient learning of high-quality policies on goal-conditioned continuous control from pixel observations in only 1-2 million environment steps.
William Whitney, Rajat Agarwal, Kyunghyun Cho, Abhinav Gupta
arXiv:1908.09357 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Aug 25, 2019 · updated Jan 14, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Published at ICLR 2020