Never Forget: Balancing Exploration and Exploitation via Learning Optical Flow

Exploration bonus derived from the novelty of the states in an environment has become a popular approach to motivate exploration for deep reinforcement learning agents in the past few years. Recent methods such as curiosity-driven exploration usually estimate the novelty of new observations by the prediction errors of their system dynamics models. Due to the capacity limitation of the models and difficulty of performing next-frame prediction, however, these methods typically fail to balance between exploration and exploitation in high-dimensional observation tasks, resulting in the agents forgetting the visited paths and exploring those states repeatedly. Such inefficient exploration behavior causes significant performance drops, especially in large environments with sparse reward signals. In this paper, we propose to introduce the concept of optical flow estimation from the field of computer vision to deal with the above issue. We propose to employ optical flow estimation errors to examine the novelty of new observations, such that agents are able to memorize and understand the visited states in a more comprehensive fashion. We compare our method against the previous approaches in a number of experimental experiments. Our results indicate that the proposed method appears to deliver superior and long-lasting performance than the previous methods. We further provide a set of comprehensive ablative analysis of the proposed method, and investigate the impact of optical flow estimation on the learning curves of the DRL agents.