Dream to Explore: Adaptive Simulations for Autonomous Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive Bayesian nonparametric approach using Gaussian processes for learning world models and policies in autonomous control, improving data efficiency and flexibility in simulated environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel method combining Bayesian nonparametrics with variational optimization for control, enhancing adaptability and performance over existing models.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in simulated control tasks

Provides automatic model adaptation to prevent overfitting and underfitting

Achieves efficient learning of dynamics and policies through imagined trajectories

Abstract

One's ability to learn a generative model of the world without supervision depends on the extent to which one can construct abstract knowledge representations that generalize across experiences. To this end, capturing an accurate statistical structure from observational data provides useful inductive biases that can be transferred to novel environments. Here, we tackle the problem of learning to control dynamical systems by applying Bayesian nonparametric methods, which is applied to solve visual servoing tasks. This is accomplished by first learning a state space representation, then inferring environmental dynamics and improving the policies through imagined future trajectories. Bayesian nonparametric models provide automatic model adaptation, which not only combats underfitting and overfitting, but also allows the model's unbounded dimension to be both flexible and computationally tractable. By employing Gaussian processes to discover latent world dynamics, we mitigate common data efficiency issues observed in reinforcement learning and avoid introducing explicit model bias by describing the system's dynamics. Our algorithm jointly learns a world model and policy by optimizing a variational lower bound of a log-likelihood with respect to the expected free energy minimization objective function. Finally, we compare the performance of our model with the state-of-the-art alternatives for continuous control tasks in simulated environments.