Self-supervised network distillation: an effective approach to exploration in sparse reward environments

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Pecháč, Matej, Chovanec, Michal, Farkaš, Igor
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914830873526272
author Pecháč, Matej
Chovanec, Michal
Farkaš, Igor
author_facet Pecháč, Matej
Chovanec, Michal
Farkaš, Igor
contents Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the agent does not come across the reward during the environmental exploration. The solution to such a problem may be to equip the agent with an intrinsic motivation that will provide informed exploration during which the agent is likely to also encounter external reward. Novelty detection is one of the promising branches of intrinsic motivation research. We present Self-supervised Network Distillation (SND), a class of intrinsic motivation algorithms based on the distillation error as a novelty indicator, where the predictor model and the target model are both trained. We adapted three existing self-supervised methods for this purpose and experimentally tested them on a set of ten environments that are considered difficult to explore. The results show that our approach achieves faster growth and higher external reward for the same training time compared to the baseline models, which implies improved exploration in a very sparse reward environment. In addition, the analytical methods we applied provide valuable explanatory insights into our proposed models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_11563
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-supervised network distillation: an effective approach to exploration in sparse reward environments
Pecháč, Matej
Chovanec, Michal
Farkaš, Igor
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the agent does not come across the reward during the environmental exploration. The solution to such a problem may be to equip the agent with an intrinsic motivation that will provide informed exploration during which the agent is likely to also encounter external reward. Novelty detection is one of the promising branches of intrinsic motivation research. We present Self-supervised Network Distillation (SND), a class of intrinsic motivation algorithms based on the distillation error as a novelty indicator, where the predictor model and the target model are both trained. We adapted three existing self-supervised methods for this purpose and experimentally tested them on a set of ten environments that are considered difficult to explore. The results show that our approach achieves faster growth and higher external reward for the same training time compared to the baseline models, which implies improved exploration in a very sparse reward environment. In addition, the analytical methods we applied provide valuable explanatory insights into our proposed models.
title Self-supervised network distillation: an effective approach to exploration in sparse reward environments
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11563