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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liang, Anthony, Thomason, Jesse, Bıyık, Erdem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10940
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author Liang, Anthony
Thomason, Jesse
Bıyık, Erdem
author_facet Liang, Anthony
Thomason, Jesse
Bıyık, Erdem
contents Training robots to perform complex control tasks from high-dimensional pixel input using reinforcement learning (RL) is sample-inefficient, because image observations are comprised primarily of task-irrelevant information. By contrast, humans are able to visually attend to task-relevant objects and areas. Based on this insight, we introduce Visual Saliency-Guided Reinforcement Learning (ViSaRL). Using ViSaRL to learn visual representations significantly improves the success rate, sample efficiency, and generalization of an RL agent on diverse tasks including DeepMind Control benchmark, robot manipulation in simulation and on a real robot. We present approaches for incorporating saliency into both CNN and Transformer-based encoders. We show that visual representations learned using ViSaRL are robust to various sources of visual perturbations including perceptual noise and scene variations. ViSaRL nearly doubles success rate on the real-robot tasks compared to the baseline which does not use saliency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_10940
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ViSaRL: Visual Reinforcement Learning Guided by Human Saliency
Liang, Anthony
Thomason, Jesse
Bıyık, Erdem
Robotics
Machine Learning
Training robots to perform complex control tasks from high-dimensional pixel input using reinforcement learning (RL) is sample-inefficient, because image observations are comprised primarily of task-irrelevant information. By contrast, humans are able to visually attend to task-relevant objects and areas. Based on this insight, we introduce Visual Saliency-Guided Reinforcement Learning (ViSaRL). Using ViSaRL to learn visual representations significantly improves the success rate, sample efficiency, and generalization of an RL agent on diverse tasks including DeepMind Control benchmark, robot manipulation in simulation and on a real robot. We present approaches for incorporating saliency into both CNN and Transformer-based encoders. We show that visual representations learned using ViSaRL are robust to various sources of visual perturbations including perceptual noise and scene variations. ViSaRL nearly doubles success rate on the real-robot tasks compared to the baseline which does not use saliency.
title ViSaRL: Visual Reinforcement Learning Guided by Human Saliency
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10940