Few-shot Quality-Diversity Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Salehi, Achkan, Coninx, Alexandre, Doncieux, Stephane
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2021
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author Salehi, Achkan
Coninx, Alexandre
Doncieux, Stephane
author_facet Salehi, Achkan
Coninx, Alexandre
Doncieux, Stephane
contents In the past few years, a considerable amount of research has been dedicated to the exploitation of previous learning experiences and the design of Few-shot and Meta Learning approaches, in problem domains ranging from Computer Vision to Reinforcement Learning based control. A notable exception, where to the best of our knowledge, little to no effort has been made in this direction is Quality-Diversity (QD) optimization. QD methods have been shown to be effective tools in dealing with deceptive minima and sparse rewards in Reinforcement Learning. However, they remain costly due to their reliance on inherently sample inefficient evolutionary processes. We show that, given examples from a task distribution, information about the paths taken by optimization in parameter space can be leveraged to build a prior population, which when used to initialize QD methods in unseen environments, allows for few-shot adaptation. Our proposed method does not require backpropagation. It is simple to implement and scale, and furthermore, it is agnostic to the underlying models that are being trained. Experiments carried in both sparse and dense reward settings using robotic manipulation and navigation benchmarks show that it considerably reduces the number of generations that are required for QD optimization in these environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2109_06826
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Few-shot Quality-Diversity Optimization
Salehi, Achkan
Coninx, Alexandre
Doncieux, Stephane
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
In the past few years, a considerable amount of research has been dedicated to the exploitation of previous learning experiences and the design of Few-shot and Meta Learning approaches, in problem domains ranging from Computer Vision to Reinforcement Learning based control. A notable exception, where to the best of our knowledge, little to no effort has been made in this direction is Quality-Diversity (QD) optimization. QD methods have been shown to be effective tools in dealing with deceptive minima and sparse rewards in Reinforcement Learning. However, they remain costly due to their reliance on inherently sample inefficient evolutionary processes. We show that, given examples from a task distribution, information about the paths taken by optimization in parameter space can be leveraged to build a prior population, which when used to initialize QD methods in unseen environments, allows for few-shot adaptation. Our proposed method does not require backpropagation. It is simple to implement and scale, and furthermore, it is agnostic to the underlying models that are being trained. Experiments carried in both sparse and dense reward settings using robotic manipulation and navigation benchmarks show that it considerably reduces the number of generations that are required for QD optimization in these environments.
title Few-shot Quality-Diversity Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06826