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Spotlight
Guided Meta-Policy Search
Russell Mendonca · Abhishek Gupta · Rosen Kralev · Pieter Abbeel · Sergey Levine · Chelsea Finn

Tue Dec 10 04:45 PM -- 04:50 PM (PST) @ West Ballroom A + B
in Track 3 Session 2 »

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated promising results on complex tasks, yet often require impractical numbers of samples because they learn from scratch. Meta-RL aims to address this challenge by leveraging experience from previous tasks so as to more quickly solve new tasks. However, in practice, these algorithms generally also require large amounts of on-policy experience during the \emph{meta-training} process, making them impractical for use in many problems. To this end, we propose to learn a reinforcement learning procedure in a federated way, where individual off-policy learners can solve the individual meta-training tasks, and then consolidate these solutions into a single meta-learner. Since the central meta-learner learns by imitating the solutions to the individual tasks, it can accommodate either the standard meta-RL problem setting, or a hybrid setting where some or all tasks are provided with example demonstrations. The former results in an approach that can leverage policies learned for previous tasks without significant amounts of on-policy data during meta-training, whereas the latter is particularly useful in cases where demonstrations are easy for a person to provide. Across a number of continuous control meta-RL problems, we demonstrate significant improvements in meta-RL sample efficiency in comparison to prior work as well as the ability to scale to domains with visual observations.

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Author Information

Russell Mendonca (UC Berkeley)
Abhishek Gupta (University of California, Berkeley)
Rosen Kralev (UC Berkeley)
Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley & covariant.ai)

Pieter Abbeel is Professor and Director of the Robot Learning Lab at UC Berkeley [2008- ], Co-Director of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, Co-Founder of covariant.ai [2017- ], Co-Founder of Gradescope [2014- ], Advisor to OpenAI, Founding Faculty Partner AI@TheHouse venture fund, Advisor to many AI/Robotics start-ups. He works in machine learning and robotics. In particular his research focuses on making robots learn from people (apprenticeship learning), how to make robots learn through their own trial and error (reinforcement learning), and how to speed up skill acquisition through learning-to-learn (meta-learning). His robots have learned advanced helicopter aerobatics, knot-tying, basic assembly, organizing laundry, locomotion, and vision-based robotic manipulation. He has won numerous awards, including best paper awards at ICML, NIPS and ICRA, early career awards from NSF, Darpa, ONR, AFOSR, Sloan, TR35, IEEE, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Pieter's work is frequently featured in the popular press, including New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Forbes, Tech Review, NPR.

Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley)
Chelsea Finn (Stanford University)

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