The vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success. However, generalizing vision-based RL policy to unknown test environments still remains as a challengingproblem. Unlike previous works that focus on training a universal RL policy that is invariant to discrepancies between test and training environment, we focus on developing an independent module to disperse interference factors irrelevant to the task, thereby providing "clean " observations for the RL policy . The proposed unsupervised visual attention and invariance method (VAI) contains three key components: 1) an unsupervisedkeypoint detection model which captures semantically meaningful keypoints in observations; 2) an unsupervised visual attention module which automatically generates the distraction-invariant attention mask for each observation; 3) a self-supervised adapter for visual distraction invariance which reconstructs distraction-invariant attention mask from observations with artificial disturbances generated by a series of foreground and background augmentations. All components are optimized in an unsupervised way, without manual annotation or access to environment internals, and only the adapter is used during inference time to provide distraction-free observations to RL policy. VAI empirically shows powerful generalization capabilities and significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method by 15 \% to 49\% in DeepMind Control suite benchmark and 61 \% to 229\% in our proposed robot manipulation benchmark, in term of cumulative rewards per episode  .
Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is successful, but how to generalize it to unknown test environments remains challenging. Existing methods focus on training an RL policy that is universal to changing visual domains, whereas we focus on extracting visual foreground that is universal, feeding clean invariant vision to the RL policy learner. Our method is completely unsupervised, without manual annotations or access to environment internals. Given videos of actions in a training environment, we learn how to extract foregrounds with unsupervised keypoint detection, followed by unsupervised visual attention to automatically generate a foreground mask per video frame. We can then introduce artificial distractors and train a model to reconstruct the clean foreground mask from noisy observations. Only this learned model is needed during test to provide distraction-free visual input to the RL policy learner. Our Visual Attention and Invariance (VAI) method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on visual domain generalization, gaining 15 to 49\% ( 61 to 229\% ) more cumulative rewards per episode on DeepMind Control (our DrawerWorld Manipulation) benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that it is not only possible to learn domain-invariant vision without any supervision, but freeing RL from visual distractions also makes the policy more focused and thus far better .
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