Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning

Code

• github.com/openai/large-scale-curiosity
  OfficialIn papertf★ 0
• github.com/vdean/audio-curiosity
  tf★ 23
• github.com/self-supervisor/how_to_stay_curious_while_avoiding_noisy_tvs
  tf★ 5
• github.com/SPark9625/Large-Scale-Study-of-Curiosity-Driven-Learning
  pytorch★ 4
• github.com/jcwleo/curiosity-driven-exploration-pytorch
  pytorch★ 0

Abstract

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing reward functions that are intrinsic to the agent. Curiosity is a type of intrinsic reward function which uses prediction error as reward signal. In this paper: (a) We perform the first large-scale study of purely curiosity-driven learning, i.e. without any extrinsic rewards, across 54 standard benchmark environments, including the Atari game suite. Our results show surprisingly good performance, and a high degree of alignment between the intrinsic curiosity objective and the hand-designed extrinsic rewards of many game environments. (b) We investigate the effect of using different feature spaces for computing prediction error and show that random features are sufficient for many popular RL game benchmarks, but learned features appear to generalize better (e.g. to novel game levels in Super Mario Bros.). (c) We demonstrate limitations of the prediction-based rewards in stochastic setups. Game-play videos and code are at https://pathak22.github.io/large-scale-curiosity/

Tasks

Benchmark Results

Reproductions