In plain words: It takes a physics-based character controller and tweaks it in two stages: small adjustments for minor changes, deeper rewrites for bigger ones. It picked up new gaits, targets, body shapes, and environments faster than retraining from scratch or other ways of reusing old controllers.
Abstract
Motivated by humans' ability to adapt skills in the learning of new ones, this paper presents AdaptNet, an approach for modifying the latent space of existing policies to allow new behaviors to be quickly learned from like tasks in comparison to learning from scratch. Building on top of a given reinforcement learning controller, AdaptNet uses a two-tier hierarchy that augments the original state embedding to support modest changes in a behavior and further modifies the policy network layers to make more substantive changes. The technique is shown to be effective for adapting existing physics-based controllers to a wide range of new styles for locomotion, new task targets, changes in character morphology and extensive changes in environment. Furthermore, it exhibits significant increase in learning efficiency, as indicated by greatly reduced training times when compared to training from scratch or using other approaches that modify existing policies. Code is available at https://motion-lab.github.io/AdaptNet.
Pei Xu, Kaixiang Xie, Sheldon Andrews, Paul G. Kry, Michael Neff, Morgan McGuire, Ioannis Karamouzas, Victor Zordan
arXiv:2310.00239 · cs.GR, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Sep 30, 2023 · updated Nov 15, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · SIGGRAPH Asia 2023. Video: https://youtu.be/WxmJSCNFb28. Website: https://motion-lab.github.io/AdaptNet, https://pei-xu.github.io/AdaptNet