Reinforcement learning (RL) often faces the challenges of uninformed search problems where the agent should explore without access to the domain knowledge such as characteristics of the environment or external rewards.

D2C requires only a few examples of desired outcomes and works in any environment, regardless of its geometry or the distribution of the desired outcome examples.

Reinforcement learning (RL) often faces the challenges of uninformed search problems where the agent should explore without access to the domain knowledge such as characteristics of the environment or external rewards. Unlike previous curriculum learning methods, D2C requires only a few examples of desired outcomes and works in any environment, regardless of its geometry or the distribution of the desired outcome examples. The proposed method performs diversification of the goal-conditional classifiers to identify similarities between visited and desired outcome states and ensures that the classifiers disagree on states from out-of-distribution, which enables quantifying the unexplored region and designing an arbitrary goal-conditioned intrinsic reward signal in a simple and intuitive way. The proposed method then employs bipartite matching to define a curriculum learning objective that produces a sequence of well-adjusted intermediate goals, which enable the agent to automatically explore and conquer the unexplored region. We present experimental results demonstrating that D2C outperforms prior curriculum RL methods in both quantitative and qualitative aspects, even with the arbitrarily distributed desired outcome examples.

Reinforcement learning (RL) often faces the challenges of uninformed search problems where the agent should explore without access to the domain knowledge such as characteristics of the environment or external rewards. To tackle these challenges, this work proposes a new approach for curriculum RL called Diversify for Disagreement & Conquer (D2C). Unlike previous curriculum learning methods, D2C requires only a few examples of desired outcomes and works in any environment, regardless of its geometry or the distribution of the desired outcome examples. The proposed method performs diversification of the goal-conditional classifiers to identify similarities between visited and desired outcome states and ensures that the classifiers disagree on states from out-of-distribution, which enables quantifying the unexplored region and designing an arbitrary goal-conditioned intrinsic reward signal in a simple and intuitive way. The proposed method then employs bipartite matching to define a curriculum learning objective that produces a sequence of well-adjusted intermediate goals, which enable the agent to automatically explore and conquer the unexplored region. We present experimental results demonstrating that D2C outperforms prior curriculum RL methods in both quantitative and qualitative aspects, even with the arbitrarily distributed desired outcome examples.

After the user provides a few examples of desired outcomes, MURAL automatically infers a reward function that takes into account these examples and the agent's uncertainty for each state. Although reinforcement learning has shown success in domains such as robotics, chip placement and playing video games, it is usually intractable in its most general form. In particular, deciding when and how to visit new states in the hopes of learning more about the environment can be challenging, especially when the reward signal is uninformative. These questions of reward specification and exploration are closely connected -- the more directed and "well shaped" a reward function is, the easier the problem of exploration becomes. The answer to the question of how to explore most effectively is likely to be closely informed by the particular choice of how we specify rewards.

After the user provides a few examples of desired outcomes, MURAL automatically infers a reward function that takes into account these examples and the agent's uncertainty for each state. Although reinforcement learning has shown success in domains such as robotics, chip placement and playing video games, it is usually intractable in its most general form. In particular, deciding when and how to visit new states in the hopes of learning more about the environment can be challenging, especially when the reward signal is uninformative. These questions of reward specification and exploration are closely connected -- the more directed and "well shaped" a reward function is, the easier the problem of exploration becomes. The answer to the question of how to explore most effectively is likely to be closely informed by the particular choice of how we specify rewards.