Noisy Agents: Self-supervised Exploration by Predicting Auditory Events
Authors: Chuang Gan, Xiaoyu Chen, Phillip Isola, Antonio Torralba, Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Keywords: Audio Curiosity, RL exploration
Abstract: Humans integrate multiple sensory modalities (e.g., visual and audio) to build a causal understanding of the physical world. In this work, we propose a novel type of intrinsic motivation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that encourages the agent to understand the causal effect of its actions through auditory event prediction. First, we allow the agent to collect a small amount of acoustic data and use K-means to discover underlying auditory event clusters. We then train a neural network to predict the auditory events and use the prediction errors as intrinsic rewards to guide RL exploration.  We first conduct an in-depth analysis of our module using a set of Atari games. We then apply our model to audio-visual exploration using the Habitat simulator and active learning using the TDW simulator. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of using audio signals over vision-based models as intrinsic rewards to guide RL explorations.