STABILIZING UNSUPERVISED ENVIRONMENT DESIGN WITH A LEARNED ADVERSARY

Ishita Mediratta, Minqi Jiang, Jack Parker-Holder, Michael Dennis, Eugene Vinitsky, Tim Rocktaschel

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

A key challenge in training generally-capable agents is the design of training tasks that facilitate broad generalization and robustness to environment variations. This challenge motivates the problem setting of Unsupervised Environment Design (UED), whereby a student agent trains on an adaptive distribution of tasks proposed by a teacher agent. A pioneering approach for UED is PAIRED, which uses reinforcement learning (RL) to train a teacher policy to design tasks from scratch, making it possible to directly generate tasks that are adapted to the agent’s current capabilities. Despite its strong theoretical backing, PAIRED suffers from a variety of challenges that hinder its practical performance. Thus, state-of-the-art methods currently rely on curation and mutation rather than generation of new tasks. In this work, we investigate several key shortcomings of PAIRED and propose solutions for each shortcoming. As a result, we make it possible for PAIRED to match or exceed state-of-the-art methods, producing robust agents in several established challenging procedurally-generated environments, including a partially-observed maze navigation task and a continuous-control car racing environment. We believe this work motivates a renewed emphasis on UED methods based on learned models that directly generate challenging environments, potentially unlocking more open-ended RL training and, as a result, more general agents.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)270-291
Number of pages22
JournalProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume232
StatePublished - 2023
Event2nd Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents, CoLLA 2023 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: Aug 22 2023Aug 25 2023

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Statistics and Probability

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