Trajectory First: A Curriculum for Discovering Diverse Policies
Poster D: Tuesday -- 16:00 - 18:00
Cornelius V. Braun, Sayantan Auddy, Marc Toussaint
Keywords: Diversity, Robotics, Exploration
Being able to solve a task in diverse ways makes agents more robust to task variations and less prone to local optima.
In this context, constrained diversity optimization has become a useful reinforcement learning (RL) framework for training a set of diverse agents in parallel.
However, existing constrained-diversity RL methods often under-explore in complex tasks such as robot manipulation, resulting in limited behavioral diversity.
We address this with a two-stage curriculum that introduces a spline-based trajectory prior as an inductive bias to produce diverse, high-reward behaviors in an initial stage, and then distills these behaviors into reactive, step-wise policies in a second stage.
In our empirical evaluation, we provide novel insights into challenges of diversity-targeted training and show that our curriculum increases the diversity of learned skills while maintaining high task performance.