Unsupervised Exploration with Deep Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) often requires large numbers of trials to solve a single specific task. This is in sharp contrast to human and animal learning: humans and animals can use past experience to acquire an understanding about the world, which they can then use to perform new tasks with minimal additional learning. In this work, we study how an unsupervised exploration phase can be used to build up such prior knowledge, which can then be utilized in a second phase to perform new tasks, either directly without any additional exploration, or through minimal fine-tuning. A critical question with this approach is: what kind of knowledge should be transferred from the unsupervised phase to the goal-directed phase? We argue that model-based RL offers an appealing solution. By transferring models, which are task-agnostic, we can perform new tasks without any additional learning at all. However, this relies on having a suitable exploration method during unsupervised training, and a model-based RL method that can effectively utilize modern high-capacity parametric function classes, such as deep neural networks. We show that both challenges can be addressed by representing model-uncertainty, which can both guide exploration in the unsupervised phase and ensure that the errors in the model are not exploited by the planner in the goal-directed phase. We illustrate, on simple simulated benchmark tasks, that our method can perform various goal-directed skills on the first attempt, and can improve further with fine-tuning, exceeding the performance of alternative exploration methods.