Unsupervised skill discovery is a learning paradigm that aims to acquire diverse behaviors without explicit rewards.

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.

Skills are essential for unlocking higher levels of problem solving. A common approach to discovering these skills is to learn ones that reliably reach different states, thus empowering the agent to control its environment. However, existing skill discovery algorithms often overlook the natural state variables present in many reinforcement learning problems, meaning that the discovered skills lack control of specific state variables. This can significantly hamper exploration efficiency, make skills more challenging to learn with, and lead to negative side effects in downstream tasks when the goal is under-specified. We introduce a general method that enables these skill discovery algorithms to learn focused skills -- skills that target and control specific state variables. Our approach improves state space coverage by a factor of three, unlocks new learning capabilities, and automatically avoids negative side effects in downstream tasks.

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. In response, we present DoDont (Do's and Dont's), an instruction-based skill discovery algorithm composed of two stages.

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. In response, we present DoDont (Do's and Don'ts), an instruction-based skill discovery algorithm composed of two stages. First, in an instruction learning stage, DoDont leverages action-free instruction videos to train an instruction network to distinguish desirable transitions from undesirable ones. Then, in the skill learning stage, the instruction network adjusts the reward function of the skill discovery algorithm to weight the desired behaviors. Specifically, we integrate the instruction network into a distance-maximizing skill discovery algorithm, where the instruction network serves as the distance function. Empirically, with less than 8 instruction videos, DoDont effectively learns desirable behaviors and avoids undesirable ones across complex continuous control tasks. Code and videos are available at https://mynsng.github.io/dodont/