VendiRL: A Framework for Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning of Diversely Diverse Skills

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Lintunen, Erik M.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Lintunen, Erik M.
author_facet Lintunen, Erik M.
contents In self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL), one of the key challenges is learning a diverse set of skills to prepare agents for unknown future tasks. Despite impressive advances, scalability and evaluation remain prevalent issues. Regarding scalability, the search for meaningful skills can be obscured by high-dimensional feature spaces, where relevant features may vary across downstream task domains. For evaluating skill diversity, defining what constitutes "diversity" typically requires a hard commitment to a specific notion of what it means for skills to be diverse, potentially leading to inconsistencies in how skill diversity is understood, making results across different approaches hard to compare, and leaving many forms of diversity unexplored. To address these issues, we adopt a measure of sample diversity that translates ideas from ecology to machine learning -- the Vendi Score -- allowing the user to specify and evaluate any desired form of diversity. We demonstrate how this metric facilitates skill evaluation and introduce VendiRL, a unified framework for learning diversely diverse sets of skills. Given distinct similarity functions, VendiRL motivates distinct forms of diversity, which could support skill-diversity pretraining in new and richly interactive environments where optimising for various forms of diversity may be desirable.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02930
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VendiRL: A Framework for Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning of Diversely Diverse Skills
Lintunen, Erik M.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
In self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL), one of the key challenges is learning a diverse set of skills to prepare agents for unknown future tasks. Despite impressive advances, scalability and evaluation remain prevalent issues. Regarding scalability, the search for meaningful skills can be obscured by high-dimensional feature spaces, where relevant features may vary across downstream task domains. For evaluating skill diversity, defining what constitutes "diversity" typically requires a hard commitment to a specific notion of what it means for skills to be diverse, potentially leading to inconsistencies in how skill diversity is understood, making results across different approaches hard to compare, and leaving many forms of diversity unexplored. To address these issues, we adopt a measure of sample diversity that translates ideas from ecology to machine learning -- the Vendi Score -- allowing the user to specify and evaluate any desired form of diversity. We demonstrate how this metric facilitates skill evaluation and introduce VendiRL, a unified framework for learning diversely diverse sets of skills. Given distinct similarity functions, VendiRL motivates distinct forms of diversity, which could support skill-diversity pretraining in new and richly interactive environments where optimising for various forms of diversity may be desirable.
title VendiRL: A Framework for Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning of Diversely Diverse Skills
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02930