An Optimisation Framework for Unsupervised Environment Design

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Monette, Nathan, Letcher, Alistair, Beukman, Michael, Jackson, Matthew T., Rutherford, Alexander, Goldie, Alexander D., Foerster, Jakob N.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Monette, Nathan
Letcher, Alistair
Beukman, Michael
Jackson, Matthew T.
Rutherford, Alexander
Goldie, Alexander D.
Foerster, Jakob N.
author_facet Monette, Nathan
Letcher, Alistair
Beukman, Michael
Jackson, Matthew T.
Rutherford, Alexander
Goldie, Alexander D.
Foerster, Jakob N.
contents For reinforcement learning agents to be deployed in high-risk settings, they must achieve a high level of robustness to unfamiliar scenarios. One method for improving robustness is unsupervised environment design (UED), a suite of methods aiming to maximise an agent's generalisability across configurations of an environment. In this work, we study UED from an optimisation perspective, providing stronger theoretical guarantees for practical settings than prior work. Whereas previous methods relied on guarantees if they reach convergence, our framework employs a nonconvex-strongly-concave objective for which we provide a provably convergent algorithm in the zero-sum setting. We empirically verify the efficacy of our method, outperforming prior methods in a number of environments with varying difficulties.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_20659
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Optimisation Framework for Unsupervised Environment Design
Monette, Nathan
Letcher, Alistair
Beukman, Michael
Jackson, Matthew T.
Rutherford, Alexander
Goldie, Alexander D.
Foerster, Jakob N.
Machine Learning
For reinforcement learning agents to be deployed in high-risk settings, they must achieve a high level of robustness to unfamiliar scenarios. One method for improving robustness is unsupervised environment design (UED), a suite of methods aiming to maximise an agent's generalisability across configurations of an environment. In this work, we study UED from an optimisation perspective, providing stronger theoretical guarantees for practical settings than prior work. Whereas previous methods relied on guarantees if they reach convergence, our framework employs a nonconvex-strongly-concave objective for which we provide a provably convergent algorithm in the zero-sum setting. We empirically verify the efficacy of our method, outperforming prior methods in a number of environments with varying difficulties.
title An Optimisation Framework for Unsupervised Environment Design
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20659