Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Position: Automatic Environment Shaping is the Next Frontier in RL

Younghyo Park · Gabriel Margolis · Pulkit Agrawal

Hall C 4-9
[ ] [ Project Page ]
Wed 24 Jul 2:30 a.m. PDT — 4 a.m. PDT
 
Oral presentation: Oral 3x Reinforcement Learning 1
Wed 24 Jul 1:30 a.m. PDT — 2:30 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

Many roboticists dream of presenting a robot with a task in the evening and returning the next morning to find the robot capable of solving the task. What is preventing us from achieving this? Sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved impressive performance on challenging robotics tasks, but requires substantial human effort to set up the task in a way that is amenable to RL. It's our position that algorithmic improvements in policy optimization and other ideas should be guided towards resolving the primary bottleneck of shaping the training environment, i.e., designing observations, actions, rewards and simulation dynamics. Most practitioners don't tune the RL algorithm, but other environment parameters to obtain a desirable controller. We posit that scaling RL to diverse robotic tasks will only be achieved if the community focuses on automating environment shaping procedures.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content