CCLF: A Contrastive-Curiosity-Driven Learning Framework for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces CCLF, a novel reinforcement learning framework that enhances sample efficiency by prioritizing informative samples, regularizing learning, and encouraging exploration through curiosity, leading to improved performance on various benchmarks.

Contribution

The paper presents a model-agnostic, contrastive-curiosity-driven framework that systematically exploits sample importance and improves data efficiency in RL.

Findings

CCLF improves sample efficiency over baseline methods.

It effectively prioritizes informative augmented samples.

Demonstrates superior performance on DeepMind Control, Atari, and MiniGrid.

Abstract

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is challenging to learn directly from high-dimensional observations, where data augmentation has recently been shown to remedy this via encoding invariances from raw pixels. Nevertheless, we empirically find that not all samples are equally important and hence simply injecting more augmented inputs may instead cause instability in Q-learning. In this paper, we approach this problem systematically by developing a model-agnostic Contrastive-Curiosity-Driven Learning Framework (CCLF), which can fully exploit sample importance and improve learning efficiency in a self-supervised manner. Facilitated by the proposed contrastive curiosity, CCLF is capable of prioritizing the experience replay, selecting the most informative augmented inputs, and more importantly regularizing the Q-function as well as the encoder to concentrate more on under-learned data. Moreover, it encourages the agent to explore with a curiosity-based reward. As a result, the agent can focus on more informative samples and learn representation invariances more efficiently, with significantly reduced augmented inputs. We apply CCLF to several base RL algorithms and evaluate on the DeepMind Control Suite, Atari, and MiniGrid benchmarks, where our approach demonstrates superior sample efficiency and learning performances compared with other state-of-the-art methods.