In plain words: An agent learns a compact model of how the world changes from images, then practices by imagining futures and adjusting behavior with feedback sent backward through them. Across 20 visual control tasks, it used less data and compute than earlier approaches and finished stronger.
Abstract
Learned world models summarize an agent's experience to facilitate learning complex behaviors. While learning world models from high-dimensional sensory inputs is becoming feasible through deep learning, there are many potential ways for deriving behaviors from them. We present Dreamer, a reinforcement learning agent that solves long-horizon tasks from images purely by latent imagination. We efficiently learn behaviors by propagating analytic gradients of learned state values back through trajectories imagined in the compact state space of a learned world model. On 20 challenging visual control tasks, Dreamer exceeds existing approaches in data-efficiency, computation time, and final performance.
Danijar Hafner, Timothy Lillicrap, Jimmy Ba, Mohammad Norouzi
arXiv:1912.01603 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.RO · submitted Dec 3, 2019 · updated Mar 17, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · 9 pages, 12 figures