MANGA: Method Agnostic Neural-policy Generalization and Adaptation

MANGA: Method Agnostic Neural-policy Generalization and Adaptation Homanga Bharadhwaj 1, Shoichiro Y amaguchi 2, and Shin-ichi Maeda 2 Abstract -- In this paper we target the problem of transferring policies across multiple environments with different dynamics parameters and motor noise variations, by introducing a framework that decouples the processes of policy learning and system identification. Efficiently transferring learned policies to an unknown environment with changes in dynamics configurations in the presence of motor noise is very important for operating robots in the real world, and our work is a novel attempt in that direction. We introduce MANGA: Method Agnostic Neural-policy Generalization and Adaptation, that trains dynamics conditioned policies and efficiently learns to estimate the dynamics parameters of the environment given off-policy state-transition rollouts in the environment. Our scheme is agnostic to the type of training method used - both reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) strategies can be used. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by experimenting with four different MuJoCo agents and comparing against previously proposed transfer baselines. I NTRODUCTION One of the most well recognized goals of robotics research is to develop autonomous agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks in various complex environments. Recently numerous deep reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) based approaches have sought to achieve good performance in complex robotic tasks through minimal supervision. However, a major concern in experimenting with the real environment directly is safety, both of the robot and of the environment. Safety concerns and also the issue of reproducibility has drawn robotics research extensively to simulation environments.