state transition
Curiosity-Critic: Cumulative Prediction Error Improvement as a Tractable Intrinsic Reward for World Model Training
Local prediction-error-based curiosity rewards focus on the current transition without considering the world model's cumulative prediction error across all visited transitions. We introduce Curiosity-Critic, which grounds its intrinsic reward in the improvement of this cumulative objective, and show that it reduces to a tractable per-step form: the difference between the current prediction error and the asymptotic error baseline of the current state transition. We estimate this baseline online with a learned critic co-trained alongside the world model; regressing a single scalar, the critic converges well before the world model saturates, redirecting exploration toward learnable transitions without oracle knowledge of the noise floor. The reward is higher for learnable transitions and collapses toward the baseline for stochastic ones, effectively separating epistemic (reducible) from aleatoric (irreducible) prediction error online. Prior prediction-error curiosity formulations, from Schmidhuber (1991) to learned-feature-space variants, emerge as special cases corresponding to specific approximations of this baseline. Experiments on a stochastic grid world show that Curiosity-Critic outperforms prediction-error and visitation-count baselines in convergence speed and final world model accuracy.
Diffusion Imitation from Observation
Learning from Observation (LfO) aims to imitate experts by learning from state-only demonstrations without requiring action labels. Existing adversarial imitation learning approaches learn a generator agent policy to produce state transitions that are indistinguishable to a discriminator that learns to classify agent and expert state transitions. Despite its simplicity in formulation, these methods are often sensitive to hyperparameters and brittle to train. Motivated by the recent success of diffusion models in generative modeling, we propose to integrate a diffusion model into the adversarial imitation learning from observation framework. Specifically, we employ a diffusion model to capture expert and agent transitions by generating the next state, given the current state. Then, we reformulate the learning objective to train the diffusion model as a binary classifier and use it to provide ``realness'' rewards for policy learning. Our proposed framework, Diffusion Imitation from Observation (DIFO), demonstrates superior performance in various continuous control domains, including navigation, locomotion, manipulation, and games.
Variational Temporal Abstraction
Taesup Kim, Sungjin Ahn, Yoshua Bengio
There have been approaches to learn such hierarchical structure in sequences such as the HMRNN (Chung et al., 2016). However, as a deterministic model, it has the main limitation that it cannot capture the stochastic nature prevailing in the data. In particular,this is acritical limitation to imagination-augmented agents because exploring various possible futures according to the uncertainty is what makes the imagination meaningful in many cases.
Agent 1 Agent 2 River Tiles (a) The initial setup with two agents and two river
Agent 1's action is resolved first. Figure 8: An example of Agent 1 using the "clean" action while facing East. The "main" beam extends directly in front of the agent, while two auxiliary A beam stops when it hits a dirty river tile. The Sequential Social Dilemma Games, introduced in Leibo et al. [2017], are a kind of MARL All of these have open source implementations in [Vinitsky et al., 2019]. The cleaning beam is shown in Figure 8a.