Pieter Abbeel: Reducing Data Needs for Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning and imitation learning have seen success in many domains, including autonomous helicopter flight, Atari, simulated locomotion, Go, robotic manipulation. However, sample complexity of these methods remains very high. In this talk I will present several ideas towards reducing sample complexity: (i) Hindsight Experience Replay, which infuses learning signal into (traditionally) zero-reward runs, and is compatible with existing off-policy algorithms; (ii) Some recent advances in Model-based Reinforcement Learning, which achieve 100x sample complexity gain over the more widely studied model-free methods; (iii) Meta-Reinforcement Learning, which can significantly reduce sample complexity by building off other skills acquired in the past; (iv) Domain Randomization, a simple idea that can often enable training fully in simulation, yet still recover policies that perform well in the real world.