Diversity Progress for Goal Selection in Discriminability-Motivated RL

TL;DR

This paper introduces Diversity Progress, a goal-selection method for intrinsically motivated RL that fosters diverse skill learning by focusing on discriminability improvement, leading to faster skill acquisition without goal collapse.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel goal-selection policy based on discriminability progress, improving skill diversity and learning speed in goal-conditioned RL without extrinsic rewards.

Findings

Faster learning of distinguishable skills compared to previous methods.

Prevents goal distribution collapse in discriminability-motivated agents.

Demonstrates effectiveness in intrinsic motivation scenarios.

Abstract

Non-uniform goal selection has the potential to improve the reinforcement learning (RL) of skills over uniform-random selection. In this paper, we introduce a method for learning a goal-selection policy in intrinsically-motivated goal-conditioned RL: "Diversity Progress" (DP). The learner forms a curriculum based on observed improvement in discriminability over its set of goals. Our proposed method is applicable to the class of discriminability-motivated agents, where the intrinsic reward is computed as a function of the agent's certainty of following the true goal being pursued. This reward can motivate the agent to learn a set of diverse skills without extrinsic rewards. We demonstrate empirically that a DP-motivated agent can learn a set of distinguishable skills faster than previous approaches, and do so without suffering from a collapse of the goal distribution -- a known issue with some prior approaches. We end with plans to take this proof-of-concept forward.