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arXiv · 1907.10580

IR-VIC: Unsupervised Discovery of Sub-goals for Transfer in RL

Nirbhay Modhe·Prithvijit Chattopadhyay·Mohit Sharma·Abhishek Das·Devi Parikh·Dhruv Batra·Ramakrishna Vedantam
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Abstract

We propose a novel framework to identify sub-goals useful for exploration in sequential decision making tasks under partial observability. We utilize the variational intrinsic control framework (Gregor et.al., 2016) which maximizes empowerment -- the ability to reliably reach a diverse set of states and show how to identify sub-goals as states with high necessary option information through an information theoretic regularizer. Despite being discovered without explicit goal supervision, our sub-goals provide better exploration and sample complexity on challenging grid-world navigation tasks compared to supervised counterparts in prior work.

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Nirbhay Modhe, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Mohit Sharma, Abhishek Das, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Ramakrishna Vedantam. 2019-07-24. IR-VIC: Unsupervised Discovery of Sub-goals for Transfer in RL. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/280

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