Deep reinforcement learning methods traditionally struggle with tasks where environment rewards are particularly sparse.

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an accurate Markov Decision Process (MDP) over high-dimensional states (e.g., raw pixels) is extremely challenging because it requires function approximation, which leads to compounding errors. Instead, to avoid compounding errors, we propose learning an abstract MDP over abstract states: low-dimensional coarse representations of the state (e.g., capturing agent position, ignoring other objects). We assume access to an abstraction function that maps the concrete states to abstract states. In our approach, we construct an abstract MDP, which grows through strategic exploration via planning. Similar to hierarchical RL approaches, the abstract actions of the abstract MDP are backed by learned subpolicies that navigate between abstract states. Our approach achieves strong results on three of the hardest Arcade Learning Environment games (Montezuma's Revenge, Pitfall!, and Private Eye), including superhuman performance on Pitfall! without demonstrations. After training on one task, we can reuse the learned abstract MDP for new reward functions, achieving higher reward in 1000x fewer samples than model-free methods trained from scratch.

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of recently developed exploration algorithms within the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We study the use of different reward bonuses that incentives exploration in reinforcement learning. We do so by fixing the learning algorithm used and focusing only on the impact of the different exploration bonuses in the agent's performance. We use Rainbow, the state-of-the-art algorithm for value-based agents, and focus on some of the bonuses proposed in the last few years. We consider the impact these algorithms have on performance within the popular game Montezuma's Revenge which has gathered a lot of interest from the exploration community, across the the set of seven games identified by Bellemare et al. (2016) as challenging for exploration, and easier games where exploration is not an issue. We find that, in our setting, recently developed bonuses do not provide significantly improved performance on Montezuma's Revenge or hard exploration games. We also find that existing bonus-based methods may negatively impact performance on games in which exploration is not an issue and may even perform worse than $\epsilon$-greedy exploration.

Deep reinforcement learning methods traditionally struggle with tasks where environment rewards are particularly sparse. One successful method of guiding exploration in these domains is to imitate trajectories provided by a human demonstrator. However, these demonstrations are typically collected under artificial conditions, i.e. with access to the agent’s exact environment setup and the demonstrator’s action and reward trajectories. Here we propose a method that overcomes these limitations in two stages. First, we learn to map unaligned videos from multiple sources to a common representation using self-supervised objectives constructed over both time and modality (i.e. vision and sound). Second, we embed a single YouTube video in this representation to learn a reward function that encourages an agent to imitate human gameplay. This method of one-shot imitation allows our agent to convincingly exceed human-level performance on the infamously hard exploration games Montezuma’s Revenge, Pitfall! and Private Eye for the first time, even if the agent is not presented with any environment rewards.

This paper investigates whether learning contingency-awareness and controllable aspects of an environment can lead to better exploration in reinforcement learning. To investigate this question, we consider an instantiation of this hypothesis evaluated on the Arcade Learning Element (ALE). In this study, we develop an attentive dynamics model (ADM) that discovers controllable elements of the observations, which are often associated with the location of the character in Atari games. The ADM is trained in a self-supervised fashion to predict the actions taken by the agent. The learned contingency information is used as a part of the state representation for exploration purposes. We demonstrate that combining A2C with count-based exploration using our representation achieves impressive results on a set of notoriously challenging Atari games due to sparse rewards. For example, we report a state-of-the-art score of >6600 points on Montezuma's Revenge without using expert demonstrations, explicit high-level information (e.g., RAM states), or supervised data. Our experiments confirm that indeed contingency-awareness is an extremely powerful concept for tackling exploration problems in reinforcement learning and opens up interesting research questions for further investigations.

Deep reinforcement learning methods traditionally struggle with tasks where environment rewards are particularly sparse. One successful method of guiding exploration in these domains is to imitate trajectories provided by a human demonstrator. However, these demonstrations are typically collected under artificial conditions, i.e. with access to the agent's exact environment setup and the demonstrator's action and reward trajectories. Here we propose a two-stage method that overcomes these limitations by relying on noisy, unaligned footage without access to such data. First, we learn to map unaligned videos from multiple sources to a common representation using self-supervised objectives constructed over both time and modality (i.e. vision and sound). Second, we embed a single YouTube video in this representation to construct a reward function that encourages an agent to imitate human gameplay. This method of one-shot imitation allows our agent to convincingly exceed human-level performance on the infamously hard exploration games Montezuma's Revenge, Pitfall! and Private Eye for the first time, even if the agent is not presented with any environment rewards.