Efficient Exploration using Model-Based Quality-Diversity with Gradients

Exploration is a key challenge in Reinforcement Learning, especially in long-horizon, deceptive and sparse-reward environments. For such applications, population-based approaches have proven effective. Methods such as Quality-Diversity deals with this by encouraging novel solutions and producing a diversity of behaviours. However, these methods are driven by either undirected sampling (i.e. mutations) or use approximated gradients (i.e. Evolution Strategies) in the parameter space, which makes them highly sample-inefficient. In this paper, we propose a model-based Quality-Diversity approach, relying on gradients and learning in imagination. Our approach optimizes all members of a population simultaneously to maintain both performance and diversity efficiently by leveraging the effectiveness of QD algorithms as good data generators to train deep models. We demonstrate that it maintains the divergent search capabilities of population-based approaches while significantly improving their sample efficiency (5 times faster) and quality of solutions (2 times more performant).