2019 ICML ICML 2019

Maximum Entropy-Regularized Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

In Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to achieve multiple goals with a goal-conditioned policy. During learning, the agent first collects the trajectories into a replay buffer, and later these trajectories are selected randomly for replay. However, the achieved goals in the replay buffer are often biased towards the behavior policies. From a Bayesian perspective, when there is no prior knowledge about the target goal distribution, the agent should learn uniformly from diverse achieved goals. Therefore, we first propose a novel multi-goal RL objective based on weighted entropy. This objective encourages the agent to maximize the expected return, as well as to achieve more diverse goals. Secondly, we developed a maximum entropy-based prioritization framework to optimize the proposed objective. For evaluation of this framework, we combine it with Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, both with or without Hindsight Experience Replay. On a set of multi-goal robotic tasks of OpenAI Gym, we compare our method with other baselines and show promising improvements in both performance and sample-efficiency.

🌉 Interdisciplinary Bridge — Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning
🧭 Keyword Pioneer — replay buffer
🐝 Cross-Pollinator — Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Mathematics & Optimization, Reinforcement Learning
🐣 Hot Topic Early Bird — entropy regularization