Learning by Playing - Solving Sparse Reward Tasks from Scratch

ICML 2018 · Martin Riedmiller, Roland Hafner, Thomas Lampe, Michael Neunert, Jonas Degrave, Tom Van de Wiele, Volodymyr Mnih, Nicolas Heess, Jost Tobias Springenberg ·

We propose Scheduled Auxiliary Control (SAC-X), a new learning paradigm in the context of Reinforcement Learning (RL). SAC-X enables learning of complex behaviors - from scratch - in the presence of multiple sparse reward signals. To this end, the agent is equipped with a set of general auxiliary tasks, that it attempts to learn simultaneously via off-policy RL. The key idea behind our method is that active (learned) scheduling and execution of auxiliary policies allows the agent to efficiently explore its environment - enabling it to excel at sparse reward RL. Our experiments in several challenging robotic manipulation settings demonstrate the power of our approach.