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arXiv · 2312.05044

Backward Learning for Goal-Conditioned Policies

Marc Höftmann·Jan Robine·Stefan Harmeling
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Abstract

Can we learn policies in reinforcement learning without rewards? Can we learn a policy just by trying to reach a goal state? We answer these questions positively by proposing a multi-step procedure that first learns a world model that goes backward in time, secondly generates goal-reaching backward trajectories, thirdly improves those sequences using shortest path finding algorithms, and finally trains a neural network policy by imitation learning. We evaluate our method on a deterministic maze environment where the observations are $64\times 64$ pixel bird's eye images and can show that it consistently reaches several goals.

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Marc Höftmann, Jan Robine, Stefan Harmeling. 2023-12-08. Backward Learning for Goal-Conditioned Policies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05044

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