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Title: Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning

Paper content:
Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineered rewards from the environment that are extrinsic to the agent.
However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is difficult and not scalable, motivating the need for developing reward functions that are intrinsic to the agent.
Curiosity is such intrinsic reward function which uses prediction error as a reward signal.
In this paper:
(a) We perform the first large-scale study of purely curiosity-driven learning, i.e. {\em without any extrinsic rewards}, across $54$ standard benchmark environments, including the Atari game suite.
Our results show surprisingly good performance as well as a high degree of alignment between the intrinsic curiosity objective and the hand-designed extrinsic rewards of many games.
(b) We investigate the effect of using different feature spaces for computing prediction error and show that random features are sufficient for many popular RL game benchmarks, but learned features appear to generalize better (e.g. to novel game levels in Super Mario Bros.).
(c) We demonstrate limitations of the prediction-based rewards in stochastic setups.
Game-play videos and code are at https://doubleblindsupplementary.github.io/large-curiosity/.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a popular method for training agents to perform complex tasks.
In RL, the agent's policy is trained by maximizing a reward function that is designed to align with the task.
The rewards are extrinsic to the agent and specific to the environment they are defined for.
Most of the success in RL has been achieved when this reward function is dense and well-shaped, e.g., a running "score" in a video game BID19 .
However, designing a wellshaped reward function is a notoriously challenging engineering problem.
An alternative to "shaping" an extrinsic reward is to supplement it with dense intrinsic rewards BID24 , that is, rewards that are generated by the agent itself.
Examples of intrinsic reward include "curiosity" BID20 BID33 BID37 BID9 BID25 which uses prediction error as reward signal, and "visitation counts" BID2 BID22 BID28 BID18 which discourages the agent from revisiting the same states.
The idea is that these intrinsic rewards will bridge the gaps between sparse extrinsic rewards by guiding the agent to efficiently explore the environment to find the next extrinsic reward.But what about scenarios with no extrinsic reward at all?
This is not as strange as it sounds.
Developmental psychologists talk about intrinsic motivation (i.e., curiosity) as the primary driver in the early stages of development BID38 BID30 : babies appear to employ goal-less exploration to learn skills that will be useful later on in life.
There are plenty of other examples, from playing Minecraft to visiting your local zoo, where no extrinsic rewards are required.
Indeed, there is evidence that pre-training an agent on a given environment using only intrinsic rewards allows it to learn much faster when fine-tuned to a novel task in a novel environment BID25 BID23 .
Yet, so far, there has been no systematic study of learning with only intrinsic rewards.In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study of agents driven purely by intrinsic rewards across a range of diverse simulated environments.
In particular, we choose the dynamics-based curiosity model of intrinsic reward presented in BID25 because it is scalable and trivially parallelizable, making it ideal for large-scale experimentation.
The central idea is to represent intrinsic reward as the error in predicting the consequence of the agent's action given its current state, Figure 1 : A snapshot of the 54 environments investigated in the paper.
We show that agents are able to make progress using no extrinsic reward, or end-of-episode signal, and only using curiosity.
Video results, code and models at https://doubleblindsupplementary.github.io/large-curiosity/.i.e
., the prediction error of learned forward-dynamics of the agent. We
thoroughly investigate the dynamics-based curiosity across 54 environments: video games, physics engine simulations, and virtual 3D navigation tasks, shown in Figure 1 .To
develop a better understanding of curiosity-driven learning, we further study the crucial factors that determine its performance. In
particular, predicting the future state in the high dimensional raw observation space (e.g., images) is a challenging problem and, as shown by recent works BID25 BID39 , learning dynamics in an auxiliary feature space leads to improved results. However
, how one chooses such an embedding space is a critical, yet open research problem. To ensure
stable online training of dynamics, we argue that the desired embedding space should: 1) be compact
in terms of dimensionality, 2) preserve sufficient
information about the observation, and 3) be a stationary function
of the observations. Through systematic ablation
, we examine the role of different ways to encode agent's observation such that an agent can perform well, driven purely by its own curiosity. Here "performing well" means
acting purposefully and skillfully in the environment. This can be assessed quantitatively
, in some cases, by measuring extrinsic rewards or environment-specific measures of exploration, or qualitatively, by observing videos of the agent interacting. We show that encoding observations
via a random network turn out to be a simple, yet surprisingly effective technique for modeling curiosity across many popular RL benchmarks. This might suggest that many popular
RL video game testbeds are not as visually sophisticated as commonly thought. Interestingly, we discover that although
random features are sufficient for good performance in environments that were used for training, the learned features appear to generalize better (e.g., to novel game levels in Super Mario Bros.).The main contributions of this paper are:
(a) Large-scale study of curiosity-driven
exploration across a variety of environments including: the set of Atari games BID1 , Super Mario Bros., virtual 3D navigation in Unity BID13 , multi-player Pong, and Roboschool environments. (b) Extensive investigation of different
feature spaces for learning the dynamics-based curiosity: random features, pixels, inverse-dynamics BID25 and variational auto-encoders BID14 and evaluate generalization to unseen environments. (c) Analysis of some limitations of a direct
prediction-error based curiosity formulation. We observe that if the agent itself is the source
of stochasticity in the environment, it can reward itself without making any actual progress. We empirically demonstrate this limitation in a 3D
navigation task where the agent controls different parts of the environment.
We have shown that our agents trained purely with a curiosity reward are able to learn useful behaviours:
(a) Agent being able to play many Atari games without using any rewards.
(b) Mario being able to cross over 11 levels without any extrinsic reward.
(c) Walking-like behavior emerged in the Ant environment.
(d) Juggling-like behavior in Robo-school environment
(e) Rally-making behavior in Two-player Pong with curiosity-driven agent on both sides.
But this is not always true as there are some Atari games where exploring the environment does not correspond to extrinsic reward.More generally, our results suggest that, in many game environments designed by humans, the extrinsic reward is often aligned with the objective of seeking novelty.Limitation of prediction error based curiosity: A more serious potential limitation is the handling of stochastic dynamics.
If the transitions in the environment are random, then even with a perfect dynamics model, the expected reward will be the entropy of the transition, and the agent will seek out transitions with the highest entropy.
Even if the environment is not truly random, unpredictability caused by a poor learning algorithm, an impoverished model class or partial observability can lead to exactly the same problem.
We did not observe this effect in our experiments on games so we designed an environment to illustrate the point.Figure 6: We add a noisy TV to the unity environment in Section 3.3.
We compare IDF and RF with and without the TV.We return to the maze of Section 3.3 to empirically validate a common thought experiment called the noisy-TV problem.
The idea is that local sources of entropy in an environment like a TV that randomly changes channels when an action is taken should prove to be an irresistible attraction to our agent.
We take this thought experiment literally and add a TV to the maze along with an action to change the channel.
In Figure 6 we show how adding the noisy-TV affects the performance of IDF and RF.
As expected the presence of the TV drastically slows down learning, but we note that if you run the experiment for long enough the agents do sometimes converge to getting the extrinsic reward consistently.
We have shown empirically that stochasticity can be a problem, and so it is important for future work to address this issue in an efficient manner.Future Work: We have presented a simple and scalable approach that can learn nontrivial behaviors across a diverse range of environments without any reward function or end-of-episode signal.
One surprising finding of this paper is that random features perform quite well, but learned features appear to generalize better.
While we believe that learning features will become more important once the environment is complex enough, we leave that for future work to explore.Our wider goal, however, is to show that we can take advantage of many unlabeled (i.e., not having an engineered reward function) environments to improve performance on a task of interest.
Given this goal, showing performance in environments with a generic reward function is just the first step, and future work will hopefully investigate transfer from unlabeled to labeled environments.

assistant: text: An agent trained only with curiosity, and no extrinsic reward, does surprisingly well on 54 popular environments, including the suite of Atari games, Mario etc.