Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

While using shaped rewards can be beneficial when solving sparse reward tasks, their successful application often requires careful engineering and is problem specific. For instance, in tasks where the agent must achieve some goal state, simple distance-to-goal reward shaping often fails, as it renders learning vulnerable to local optima. We introduce a simple and effective model-free method to learn from shaped distance-to-goal rewards on tasks where success depends on reaching a goal state. Our method introduces an auxiliary distance-based reward based on pairs of rollouts to encourage diverse exploration. This approach effectively prevents learning dynamics from stabilizing around local optima induced by the naive distance-to-goal reward shaping and enables policies to efficiently solve sparse reward tasks. Our augmented objective does not require any additional reward engineering or domain expertise to implement and converges to the original sparse objective as the agent learns to solve the task. We demonstrate that our method successfully solves a variety of hard-exploration tasks (including maze navigation and 3D construction in a Minecraft environment), where naive distance-based reward shaping otherwise fails, and intrinsic curiosity and reward relabeling strategies exhibit poor performance.

Snapbooks--the Thinking Ink Press take on chapbooks--are short books packed with page-turning stories. Join us at Kaleid Gallery in San Jose on Friday, June 24, from 7:00-9:00 p.m. Marilyn and Anthony will read their work, and Keiko O'Leary will demonstrate and teach the art of hand-folding Instant Books from a single sheet of paper. You can also check out beautiful, original cover art created by local artist Sandi Billingsley for Thinking Ink Press. What: Launch party for Beyond the Fence and Sibling Rivalry When: Friday, June 24, 2016, from 7:00-9:00 p.m. Where: Kaleid Gallery 88 South Fourth Street, San Jose, CA, 95112, USA TEL: 1-408- 947-1785 Parking: Kaleid is located in downtown San Jose, on the street level of the Fourth Street parking garage (near the King Library). Garage parking costs 5 after 6:00 p.m. Street parking can be hard to find, but is free after 6:00 p.m. What Do I Need to Do?: Come to the party and bring friends!