Paper:
Improving Exploration in Evolution Strategies for Deep Reinforcement Learning via a Population of Novelty-Seeking Agents
Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much faster (e.g. hours vs. days) because they parallelize better. However, many RL problems require directed exploration because they have reward functions that are sparse or deceptive (i.e. contain local optima), and it is unknown how to encourage such exploration with ES. Here we show that algorithms that have been invented to promote directed exploration in small-scale evolved neural networks via populations of exploring agents, specifically novelty search (NS) and quality diversity (QD) algorithms, can be hybridized with ES to improve its performance on sparse or deceptive deep RL tasks, while retaining scalability. Our experiments confirm that the resultant new algorithms, NS-ES and two QD algorithms, NSR-ES and NSRA-ES, avoid local optima encountered by ES to achieve higher performance on Atari and simulated robots learning to walk around a deceptive trap. This paper thus introduces a family of fast, scalable algorithms for reinforcement learning that are capable of directed exploration. It also adds this new family of exploration algorithms to the RL toolbox and raises the interesting possibility that analogous algorithms with multiple simultaneous paths of exploration might also combine well with existing RL algorithms outside ES.

Review:
This submission proposes methods to enhance exploration in the Evolution Strategies framework introduced by Salimans et al. (ES), a black box optimization method that can leverage massive hardware resources to speedup training of RL agents, by introducing novelty seeking objectives from evolution/genetic algorithms literature. The balance between exploration and exploitation is a fundamental problem in RL, which has been thoroughly studied for many DRL methods, and is very interesting to explore it for alternative methods like ES. I find NSRA-ES particularly interesting, as it naturally handles the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, and will likely motivate new research in this direction. One of the weaknesses of the approach is the definition of the behavior characterization, which is domain-dependent, and may be difficult to set in some environments; however, the authors make this point clear in the paper and I understand that finding methods to define good behavior characterization functions is out of the scope of the submission.  The article is properly motivated, review of related work is thorough and extensive experiments are conducted. The methods are novel and their limitations are appropriately stated and justified. The manuscript is carefully written and easy to follow. Source code is provided in order to replicate the results, which is very valuable to the community. Overall, I believe this is a high quality submission and should be accepted to NIPS.   Please read more detailed comments below:  - The idea of training M policies in parallel is somewhat related to [Liu et al., Stein Variational Policy Gradient], a method that optimizes for a distribution of M diverse and high performing policies. Please add this reference to the related work section.  - The update of w in NSRA-ES somehow resembles the adaptation of parameter noise in [Plapper et al., “Parameter Space Noise for Exploration”, ICLR 2018]. The main difference is that the adaptation in Plappert et al. is multiplicative, thus yielding more aggressive changes. Although this is not directly compatible with the proposed method, where w is initialized to 0, I wonder whether the authors tried different policies for the adaptation of w. Given its similarity to ES (where parameter noise is used for structured exploration instead of policy optimization), I believe this is a relevant reference that should be included in the paper as well.  - It seems that the authors report the best policy in plots and tables (i.e. if f(theta_t) > f(theta_{t+k}), the final policy weights are theta_t). This is different to the setup by Salimans et al. (c.f. Figure 3 in their paper). I understand that this is required for methods that rely on novelty only (i.e. NS-ES), but not for all of them. Please make this difference clear in the text.  - Related to the previous point, I believe that section 3.1 lacks a sentence describing how the final policy is selected (I understand that the best performing one, in terms of episodic reward, is kept).  - In the equation between lines 282 and 283, authors should state how they handle comparisons between episodes with different lengths. I checked the provided code and it seems that the authors pad the shorter sequence by replicating its last state in order to compare both trajectories. Also, the lack of a normalization factor of 1/T makes this distance increase with T and favors longer trajectories (which can be a good proxy for many Atari games, but not necessarily for other domains). These decisions should be understood by readers without needing to check the code.  - There is no caption for Figure 3 (right). Despite it is mentioned in the text, all figures should have a caption.  - The blue and purple color in the plots are very similar. Given the small size of some of these plots, it is hard to distinguish them -- especially in the legend, where the line is quite thin. Please use different colors (e.g. use some orangish color for one of those lines).  - Something similar happens with the ES plot in Figure 2. The trajectory is quite hard to distinguish in a computer screen.  - In SI 6.5, the authors should mention that despite the preprocessing is identical to that in Mnih et al. [7], the evaluation is slightly different as no human starts are used.   - In SI 6.6, the network description in the second paragraph is highly overlapping with that in the first paragraph.    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Most of my comments had to do with minor modifications that the authors will adress. As stated in my initial review, I vote for accepting this submission.