Unsupervised skill discovery is a learning paradigm that aims to acquire diverse behaviors without explicit rewards. However, it faces challenges in learning complex behaviors and often leads to learning unsafe or undesirable behaviors. For instance, in various continuous control tasks, current unsupervised skill discovery methods succeed in learning basic locomotions like standing but struggle with learning more complex movements such as walking and running. Moreover, they may acquire unsafe behaviors like tripping and rolling or navigate to undesirable locations such as pitfalls or hazardous areas.

Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse. However, deciding when to stop optimizing and collect new trajectories is non-trivial, as it requires to account for the variance of the objective function estimate. In this paper, we propose a novel, model-free, policy search algorithm, POIS, applicable in both action-based and parameter-based settings. We first derive a high-confidence bound for importance sampling estimation; then we define a surrogate objective function, which is optimized offline whenever a new batch of trajectories is collected. Finally, the algorithm is tested on a selection of continuous control tasks, with both linear and deep policies, and compared with state-of-the-art policy optimization methods.

Model-free deepreinforcement learning (RL)algorithms havebeenwidely used for a range of complex control tasks.

These assumptions are not strong and can be satisfied in most of environments includes MuJoCo, Atarigamesandsoon. Let f be an Lebesgue integrable function, P and Q are two probability distributions, |f| C,then EP(x)f(x) EQ(x)f(x) CDTV(P,Q) (5) Proof. Suppose there are two actions a1, a2 under state s, and let Q1(s,a1) = u, Q1(s,a2) = v. In this way, we can derive the upper bound of Ea π2Q1(s,a) Ea π1Q1(s,a)asabove. Since both sides of the above equation have the same minimum (here the minima are given by Qk = Q), we can replace the objective in Problem 2 with the upper bound in Eq. (10) and solve therelaxedoptimizationproblem.

Off-Policy Actor-Critic (OffP-AC) methods have proven successful in a variety of continuous control tasks. Normally, the critic's action-value function is updated using temporal-difference, and the critic in turn provides a loss for the actor that trains it to take actions with higher expected return. In this paper, we introduce a flexible and augmented meta-critic that observes the learning process and meta-learns an additional loss for the actor that accelerates and improves actor-critic learning. Compared to existing meta-learning algorithms, meta-critic is rapidly learned online for a single task, rather than slowly over a family of tasks. Crucially, our meta-critic is designed for off-policy based learners, which currently provide state-of-the-art reinforcement learning sample efficiency. We demonstrate that online meta-critic learning benefits to a variety of continuous control tasks when combined with contemporary OffP-AC methods DDPG, TD3 and SAC.