Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


( events)   Timezone:  
Poster
Wed Jul 11 09:15 AM -- 12:00 PM (PDT) @ Hall B #41
Learning by Playing - Solving Sparse Reward Tasks from Scratch
Martin Riedmiller · Roland Hafner · Thomas Lampe · Michael Neunert · Jonas Degrave · Tom Van de Wiele · Vlad Mnih · Nicolas Heess · Jost Springenberg
[ PDF

We propose Scheduled Auxiliary Control (SAC-X), a new learning paradigm in the context of Reinforcement Learning (RL). SAC-X enables learning of complex behaviors - from scratch - in the presence of multiple sparse reward signals. To this end, the agent is equipped with a set of general auxiliary tasks, that it attempts to learn simultaneously via off-policy RL. The key idea behind our method is that active (learned) scheduling and execution of auxiliary policies allows the agent to efficiently explore its environment - enabling it to excel at sparse reward RL. Our experiments in several challenging robotic manipulation settings demonstrate the power of our approach.