summaries: This paper proposes a method for combining intrinsic motivation on a state space with goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), where goals are defined in some “perceptual space,” such as text or images, which describe the current state. The authors assume access to a renderer that maps states to perceptual goals, but do not assume that the renderer is differentiable. The authors propose to train an intrinsically motivated latent-conditioned policy, using similar techniques as past work in which a policy maximizes the mutual information between a latent variable and the current state. The goal-conditioned policy is then trained to effectively imitate the latent-conditioned policy by maximizing the same reward as the latent-conditioned policy, conditioned on only the rendered version of the final state reached by the latent-conditioned policy. The authors demonstrate that the overall method outperforms past GCRL methods on a variety of tasks (Atari, MuJoCo manipulation and locomotion, and toy tasks).

summaries: This paper proposes an unsupervised learning objective for learning perceptual goal-conditioned policies. The goal is to enable unsupervised discovery of high-level behaviors in tandem with a perceptual-goal conditioned policy that can achieve these behaviors. The learning proceeds by training one policy to exhibit diverse behaviors; the states induced by these behaviors are then rendered and used as target goal states for a separate goal-conditioned policy.

summaries: This paper proposes a new solution to the problem of learning goal-conditioned policies without hand-crafted rewards. Prior work in this domain learn an embedding space to compute reward between current state and goal. In contrast, this paper utilizes unsupervised skill discovery from [1] to obtain a discriminator that identifies which states belong to a particular skill. Then, the final state of a given skill's execution is used as a goal input to a goal-conditioned policy, which is rewarded if it generates states that the discriminator identifies with this skill. The paper aims to validate the benefit of such a reward over other embedding-distance based reward functions on a variety of environments.

abstractText: It is of significance for an agent to learn a widely applicable and general-purpose policy that can achieve diverse goals including images and text descriptions. Considering such perceptually-specific goals, the frontier of deep reinforcement learning research is to learn a goal-conditioned policy without hand-crafted rewards. To learn this kind of policy, recent works usually take as the reward the nonparametric distance to a given goal in an explicit embedding space. From a different viewpoint, we propose a novel unsupervised learning approach named goal-conditioned policy with intrinsic motivation (GPIM), which jointly learns both an abstract-level policy and a goal-conditioned policy. The abstract-level policy is conditioned on a latent variable to optimize a discriminator and discovers diverse states that are further rendered into perceptually-specific goals for the goal-conditioned policy. The learned discriminator serves as an intrinsic reward function for the goal-conditioned policy to imitate the trajectory induced by the abstract-level policy. Experiments on various robotic tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed GPIM method which substantially outperforms prior techniques.

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title: The unreasonable effectiveness of deep features as a perceptual metric

heading: 1 INTRODUCTION

text:
Reinforcement learning (RL) makes it possible to drive agents to achieve sophisticated goals in complex and uncertain environments, from computer games (Badia et al., 2020; Berner et al., 2019) to real robot control (Lee et al., 2018; Lowrey et al., 2018; Vecerik et al., 2019; Popov et al., 2017), which usually involves learning a specific policy for individual task relying on task-specific reward. However, autonomous agents are expected to exist persistently in the world and have the ability to solve diverse tasks. To achieve this, one needs to build a universal reward function and design a mechanism to automatically generate diverse goals for training. Raw sensory inputs such as images have been considered as common goals for agents to practice on and achieve (Watter et al., 2015; Florensa et al., 2019; Nair et al., 2018; 2019), which further exacerbates the challenge for designing autonomous RL agents that can deal with such perceptually-specific inputs.
Previous works make full use of a goal-achievement reward function as available prior knowledge (Pong et al., 2018), such as Euclidean distance. Unfortunately, this kind of measurement in original space is not very effective for visual tasks since the distance between images does not correspond to meaningful distance between states (Zhang et al., 2018). Further, the measure function is applied in the embedding space, where the representations of raw sensory inputs are learned by means of using a latent variable model like VAE (Higgins et al., 2017b; Nair et al., 2018) or using the contrastive loss (Sermanet et al., 2018; Warde-Farley et al., 2018). We argue that these approaches taking prior non-parametric reward function in original or embedding space as above may limit the repertoires of behaviors and impose manual engineering burdens (Pong et al., 2019).
In the absence of any prior knowledge about the measure function, standard unsupervised RL methods learn a latent-conditioned policy through the lens of empowerment Salge et al. (2014); Eysenbach et al. (2018); Sharma et al. (2019) or the self-consistent trajectory autoencoder (Co-Reyes et al., 2018; Hausman et al., 2018). However, the learned policy is conditioned on the latent variables rather than perceptually-specific goals. Applying these procedures to goal-reaching tasks, similar to parameter initialization or the hierarchical RL, needs an external reward function for the new tasks; otherwise the learned latent-conditioned policy cannot be applied directly to user-specified goals.
Different from previous works, a novel unsupervised RL scheme is proposed in this paper to learn goal-conditioned policy by jointly learning an extra abstract-level policy conditioned on latent variables. The abstract-level policy is trained to generate diverse abstract skills while the goalconditioned policy is trained to efficiently achieve perceptually-specific goals that are rendered from the states induced by the corresponding abstract skills. Specifically, we optimize a discriminator in an unsupervised manner for the purpose of reliable exploration (Salge et al., 2014) to provide the intrinsic reward for the abstract-level policy. Then the learned discriminator serves as an intrinsic reward function for the goal-conditioned policy to imitate the trajectory induced by the abstract-level policy. In essence, the abstract-level policy can reproducibly influence the environment, and the goal-conditioned policy perceptibly imitates these influences. To improve the generalization ability of goal-conditioned policy in dealing with perceptually-specific inputs, a latent variable model is further considered in the goal-conditioned policy to disentangle goals into latent generative factors.
The main contribution of our work is an unsupervised RL method that can learn perceptually-specific goal-conditioned policy without the prior reward function for autonomous agents. We propose a novel training procedure for this model, which provides an universal and effective reward function for various perceptual goals, e.g. images and text descriptions. Furthermore, we introduce a latent variable model for learning the representations of high-dimensional goals, and demonstrate the potential of our model to generalize behaviors across new tasks. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

heading: 2 PRELIMINARIES

text:
RL: An agent interacts with an environment and selects actions in RL so as to maximize the expected amount of reward received in the long run (Sutton & Barto, 2018), which can be modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP) (Puterman, 2014). An MDP is defined as a tuple M = (S,A, p,R, γ), where S and A are state and action spaces, p(·|s, a) gives the next-state distribution upon taking action a in state s, R(s, a, s′) is a random variable representing the reward received at transition s a→ s′, and γ ∈ [0, 1) is a discount factor. Intrinsic Motivation: RL with intrinsic motivation obtains the intrinsic reward by maximizing the mutual information between latent variables ω and agent’s behaviors τ : I(ω; τ), where the specific manifestation of τ can be an entire trajectory (Achiam et al., 2018), an individual state (Eysenbach et al., 2018) or a final state (Gregor et al., 2016); and the specific implementation includes reverse and forward forms (Campos et al., 2020). Please refer to Aubret et al. (2019) for more details.
Disentanglement: Given an observation x with a dimension of N , VAE (Kingma & Welling, 2013; Higgins et al., 2017a) is a latent model that pairs a top-down encoder q(z|x) with bottom-up decoder network p(x|z) by introducing a latent factor z, where dim(z) < N . To encourage the inferred latent factor z to capture the generative factor of x in a disentangled manner, an isotropic unit Gaussian prior p(z) ∼ N(0; I) is commonly used to control the capacity of the information bottleneck (Burgess et al., 2018) by minimizing the KL divergence between q(z|x) and p(z).

heading: 3 THE METHOD

text: In this section, we firstly formalize the problem and introduce the framework. Secondly, we elaborate on the process of how to jointly learn the goal-conditioned policy and abstract-level policy. Thirdly, disentanglement is applied in our setting to improve the generalization ability.

heading: 3.1 OVERVIEW

text:
Given perceptually-specific goal g, our objective is to learn a goal-conditioned policy πθ (a|s̃, g) that inputs state s̃ and g and outputs action a as shown in Fig. 1. The abstract-level policy πµ(a|s, ω) takes as input state s and a latent variable ω and outputs action a, where ω corresponds to diverse latent skills. The discriminator qφ is firstly trained at the abstract-level for reliable exploration, then it provides the reward signal for the goal-conditioned policy to imitate the trajectory induced by the abstract-level policy. The abstract-level policy is able to generate diverse states s that are further rendered as diverse perceptually-specific goal g = Render(s). On this basis, πθ (a|s̃, g)
conditioned on the rendered goal g interacts with the reset environment under the instruction of the reward function qφ. We use the non-tilde s and the tilde s̃ to distinguish between the states of two policies respectively. Actually, s̃ and s come from the same distribution.
3.2 PROPOSED GPIM METHOD
In order to jointly learn the abstract-level policy πµ(a|s, ω) and goal-conditioned policy πθ (a|s̃, g), we maximize the mutual information between the state s and latent variable w for πµ, and simultaneously maximize the mutual information between the state s̃ and goal g for πθ. Consequently, the overall objective function to be maximized can be expressed as follows 1
F(µ, θ) = I(s;ω) + I(s̃; g). (1) For clarification, Fig. 2 depicts the graphical model for the latent variable ω, state s induced by πµ, goal g rendered from s, and state s̃ induced by πθ. As seen, the latent variable ω ∼ p(ω)2 is firstly used to generate state s via the policy πµ interacting with dynamic environment. Then, we use the state s to generate perceptually-specific goal g. After that, the goal-conditioned policy πθ outputs action a to interact with the environment to obtain the state s̃ at the next time step. In particular, ω is expected to generate diverse behavior modes through πµ while πθ behaving like s̃ is to imitate this behavior by taking as input the rendered goal g. Based on the context, the correlation between s̃ and g is no less than that between s̃ and w , so that I(s̃; g) ≥ I(s̃;ω) (Beaudry & Renner, 2011). Thus, we can obtain the lower bound of F(µ, θ):
F(µ, θ) ≥ I(s;ω) + I(s̃;ω) = 2H(ω)−H(ω|s)−H(ω|s̃) = Eω,s,s̃ [log p(ω|s) + log p(ω|s̃)− 2 log p(ω)] . (2)
Since it is difficult to exactly compute the posterior distributions p(ω|s) and p(ω|s̃), Jensen’s Inequality (Barber & Agakov, 2003) is further applied for approximation by using a learned discrimi-
1To further clarify the motivation, we conduct the ablation study to compare our method with that just maximizing I(s;ω) and that just maximizing I(s; g) in Appendix A.1.
2p(ω) denotes the prior distribution. Fixing p(ω) instead of learning it is to prevent πµ from collapsing to sampling only a handful of skills. In experiment, we use a categorical distribution for p(ω) following DIAYN.
Algorithm 1 Learning process of our proposed GPIM
1: while not converged do 2: Sample skill ω ∼ p(ω). 3: # Step I 4: Sample initial state s0 ∼ p0(s). 5: for t = 0, 1, ..., T steps do 6: Sample action at ∼ πµ(at|st, ω). 7: Step environment: st+1 ∼ p(st+1|st, at). 8: Render goal: gt = Render(st+1). 9: Compute reward rt for policy πµ using (5).
10: Update policy πµ to maximize rt with SAC.
11: Update discriminator (qφ) to maximize log qφ(ω|st+1) with SGD. 12: end for
13: # Step II 14: Sample initial state s̃0 ∼ p0(s̃). 15: for t = 0, 1, ..., T − 1 steps do 16: Sample action at ∼ πθ(at|s̃t, gt). 17: Step environment: s̃t+1 ∼ p(s̃t+1|s̃t, at). 18: Compute reward r̃t for policy πθ using (7). 19: Update policy πθ to maximize r̃t with SAC
(θ = {ϑE , ϑG} when considering the disentanglement).
20: Update ϑE and ϑD by maximizing Dis loss in (8) using SGD. 21: end for 22: end while
nator network qφ(ω|·) (see Appendix B.1 for the derivation). Thus, F(µ, θ) ≥ Eω,s,s̃ [log qφ(ω|s) + log qφ(ω|s̃)− 2 log p(ω)] , J (µ, φ, θ), (3)
where it is worth noting that the identical discriminator qφ with the parameter φ is used for the variational approximation of p(ω|s) and p(ω|s̃). For the state s induced by skill w and s̃ originating from g, the shared discriminator qφ assigns a similarly high probability on w for both states s and s̃ associated with the same ω. Intuitively, we factorize the abstract-level policy and learn it purely in the space of the agent’s embodiment (i.e., the latent variable ω) — separate from the perceptually-specified goals (e.g., images and text descriptions). The space of goals in these two spaces has different characteristics due to the underlying manifold spaces. Therefore, qφ can be regarded as a reward network shared by the abstract-level policy πµ(a|s, ω) and goal-conditioned policy πθ (a|s̃, g). According to the objective function J (µ, φ, θ) in (3), we propose an alternating optimization between πµ and πθ as follows:
Step I: Fix πθ and update πµ and qφ. In this case, θ is not a variable to update and J (µ, φ, θ) becomes
J (µ, φ) = Eω,s [log qφ(ω|s)] + Eω,s̃ [log qφ(ω|s̃)− 2 log p(ω)]︸ ︷︷ ︸ Variable independent term . (4)
According to (4), J (µ, φ) can be thus optimized by setting the reward at time step t for πµ as rt = log qφ(ω|st+1)− log p(ω), (5)
where the term − log p(ω) is added for agents to avoid artificial termination and reward-hacking issues (Amodei et al., 2016). We implement this optimization with soft actor-critic (SAC). On the other hand, the reward network qφ can be updated with SGD by maximizing Eω,s [log qφ(ω|s)]. Step II: Fix πµ and qφ to update πθ. In this case, µ and φ are not variables to update any more and J (µ, φ, θ) can be simplified as
J (θ) = Eω,s̃ [log qφ(ω|s̃)] + Eω,s [log qφ(ω|s)− 2 log p(ω)]︸ ︷︷ ︸ Variable independent term . (6)
According to (6), J (θ) can thus be optimized by setting the reward at time step t for πθ as r̃t = log qφ(ω|s̃t+1)− log p(ω), (7)
where the term − log p(ω) is added for the same reason as above and we also implement this optimization with SAC. These two steps are performed alternately until convergence. The overall GPIM is summarized in Algorithm 1, which includes the disentanglement (red) in the next subsection.

heading: 3.3 IMPROVE GENERALIZATION VIA DISENTANGLEMENT

text:
The goal gt can be further disentangled (Higgins et al., 2017a) so as to improve the generalization ability of the goal-conditioned policy πθ.
As shown in Fig. 3, we decompose πθ into two components: the encoder network E parameterized by ϑE and the generative network G parameterized by ϑG. So we have πθ(at|s̃t, gt) = pϑG(at|s̃t, qϑE (z|gt)). To encourage this disentangling property in the inferred qϑE (z|gt), we adopt an prior p(z) ∼ N(0; I) to control the capacity of the information bottleneck by minimizing the KL diver-
gence between qϑE (z|gt) and p(z). Hence, the overall objective function of goal-conditioned policy πθ becomes
max ϑE ,ϑG,ϑD Eω,s̃t [r̃t] + α · Egt,z [pϑD (gt|z)]− β · Egt [KL(qϑE (z|gt)||p(z))]︸ ︷︷ ︸ ,Dis loss , (8)
where α and β are two hyperparameters. It is worth noting that the update of the encoder E is based on gradients from both πθ and Dis loss. With this disentanglement, the overall GPIM method is given in Algorithm 1 as mentioned above.

heading: 4 RELATED WORK

text:
Investigating goal distribution: Many prior methods (Schaul et al., 2015; Andrychowicz et al., 2017; Pong et al., 2018; Hartikainen et al., 2019) assume an available distribution of goals during exploration for sparse-reward problems, where the resampled goals are restricted to states encountered along the trajectory (Andrychowicz et al., 2017; Levy et al., 2017) or in an embedding space (Nair et al., 2018). The setting of goals for learning policy has been discussed in Baranes & Oudeyer (2013). Recently, several works (Colas et al., 2018; Warde-Farley et al., 2018; Florensa et al., 2019; Nair et al., 2018; Péré et al., 2018) adopt heuristics to design a goal distribution based on previously visited states. However, many of these (Nair et al., 2018; Pong et al., 2019; Warde-Farley et al., 2018) assume an ideal matching of the goal space with the state space.
Learning goal-conditioned policy: Several recent works propose various methods for agents to automatically learn policies by maximizing the mutual information between behaviors (e.g., latent variables) and tasks (e.g., goals). DISCERN (Warde-Farley et al., 2018) simultaneously learns a goal-conditioned policy and a goal achievement reward function that measures how similar a state is to the goal state. Pong et al. (2019) concurrently trains a goal-reaching policy and maximizes the entropy of the generated goal distribution. Given the difficulty of vision-based RL, Pong et al. (2019) resorts to RIG (Nair et al., 2018), which obtains reward using prior non-parametric measure function in embedding spaces. Other unsupervised methods (Sharma et al., 2019; Campos et al., 2020), capable of learning diverse skills, are difficult to apply directly to user-specified tasks.
Learning disentanglement representation: Many prior works utilize unsupervised learning in RL to acquire disentanglement representation (Bengio et al., 2013; Higgins et al., 2017a; Chen et al., 2016; Burgess et al., 2018). Some works take the disentanglement representation as a substitute for states (Higgins et al., 2017b; Ha & Schmidhuber, 2018; Jonschkowski et al., 2017; Finn et al., 2016; Lange et al., 2012; Watter et al., 2015; Srinivas et al., 2018; Nair et al., 2019; Srinivas et al., 2018) while others consider a non-parametric metric in a latent space to acquire a reward function (Nair et al., 2018; Sermanet et al., 2018). Besides, a few works directly embed manipulation tasks to generalize to long-horizon tasks (Goyal et al., 2019; Hausman et al., 2018; Mandlekar et al., 2020).
Hindsight, self-play and knowledge distillation: Our method is similar in spirit to goal relabeling methods like hindsight experience replay (HER) (Andrychowicz et al., 2017) which replays each episode with a different goal in addition to the one the agent was trying to achieve. However, HER requires a prior reward function and a hand-crafted goal space. By contrast, GPIM is unsupervised and able to find its own goal space. The self-play (Sukhbaatar et al., 2017; 2018) is closely related to our scheme, leading to emergent autocurricula by pitting two versions of the same agent against one another. However, these approaches generally require prior reward functions. As for knowledge distillation (Xu et al., 2020), we aim at extracting the relationship between two different tasks.

heading: 5 EXPERIMENTS

text:
Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate our proposed GPIM method, where the following four questions3 will be considered in the main paper: 1) By using the ”archery” task, we clarify whether qφ can provide an effective reward function on learning the goal-conditioned policy πθ. Furthermore, more complex tasks including navigation, object manipulation, atari games, and mujoco tasks are introduced to answer: 2) Does our model learn effective behaviors conditioned on a variety of goals, including high-dimensional images and text descriptions that are heterogeneous to states? 3) Does the proposed GPIM on learning a goal-conditioned policy outperform baselines? 4) Does the learned reward function produce better expressiveness of tasks, compared with the prior non-parametric function in the embedding space? Video is available under https://sites.google.com/view/gpim.
Visualizing the learned reward function. We start with simple ”archery” task to visualize how the learned reward function (discriminator qφ) accounts for goal-conditioned behaviors in dynamics. The task shown in Fig. 4 requires choosing an angle at which we shoot an arrow to the target. The left upper subfigure shows that in a deterministic environment, given three different but fixed targets (with different colors), the arrow reaches the corresponding target successfully under the learned reward function
qφ. The reward as a function of the final location of arrows in three tasks is shown on the right. We can find that the learned reward functions resemble convexes in terms of the distance between final states to targets, where vertexes appear in the positions of the corresponding targets. Specifically, the maximum value of the learned reward function is achieved when the final state is close to the given target. The farther away the agent’s final state is from the target, the smaller this reward value is. Similarly, the same conclusion can be drawn from the stochastic environment in the left lower subfigure, where the angle of the arrow has a 50% chance to become a mirror-symmetric angle. We see that the learned reward function substantially describes the dynamics and the corresponding tasks, both in deterministic and stochastic environments. This answers our first question.
3Due to the page limitation, more experimental analysis and results are included in the Appendix.
Scaling to more complex tasks. To answer our second question, we now consider more complex tasks as shown in Fig. 5. 1) In 2D navigation tasks, an agent can move in each of the four cardinal directions. We consider the following two tasks: moving the agent to a specific coordinate named x-y goal4 and moving the agent to a specific object with certain color and shape named color-shape goal. 2) Object manipulation considers a moving agent in 2D environment with one block for manipulation, and the other block as a distractor. The agent first needs to reach the block and then move the block to the given location, where the block is described using color and shape. In other words, the description of the goal contains the color-shape goal of the true target block and the x-y goal of the target coordinate. 3) Three atari games including seaquest, berzerk and montezuma revenge require an agent to reach the given final states. 4) We use three mujoco tasks (swimmer, half cheetah, and fetch) taken from OpenAI GYM (Brockman et al., 2016) to fast imitate given expert trajectories. Specifically, the goals for πθ in 2D navigation, object manipulation and atari games are the rendered final state sT induced by abstract-level policy πµ: gt = Render(sT ), and the goals for πθ in mujoco tasks are the rendered trajectories induced by πµ: {g0, g1, ...} = Render({s1, s2, ...}). The left subfigure of Fig. 5(a) shows the learned behaviors of navigation in continuous action space given the x-y goal which is denoted as the small circle, and the right subfigure shows the trajectory of behavior with the given color-shape goal. More results on discrete navigation can be found in Appendix D.2. As observed, the agent manages to learn navigation tasks by using GPIM. Further, 2D navigation with color-shape goal (Fig. 5(a) right) and object manipulation tasks (Fig. 5(b)) show the effectiveness of our model facing heterogeneous goals and states. Specifically, Fig. 5(b) shows the behaviors of the agent on object manipulation, where the agent is asked to first arrive at a block (i.e., blue circle and green square respectively) and then push it to the given location inside a dark circle (i.e., [6.7, 8.0] and [4.8, 7.9] respectively), where the red object exists as a distractor. Fig. 5(c) shows the behaviors of agents that reach the final states in a higher dimensional (action, state and goal) space on seaquest, berzerk and montezuma revenge respectively. Fig. 5(d-f) shows how the agent imitates expert trajectories of swimmer, half cheetah and fetch.
By learning to reach diverse goals generated by the abstract-level policy and then disentangling the goals, the agent learns the ability to infer new goals later encountered by the agent. For example, as in Fig. 5(a) (right), learning three behaviors with the goal of red-square, red-circle or blue-square in a gray background makes the agent accomplish the new goal of blue-circle in a white background. We further conduct the ablation study in Appendix A.3 to show how the disentanglement affects the learned behaviors, and use more experiments to show the generalization of the goal-conditioned policy to unseen goals in Appendix A.4.
Solving complex temporally-extended tasks is a long-standing RL problem (Jiang et al., 2019). For this purpose, we further make agents imitate the given composite behaviors (i.e., expert behaviors) and show their performance in Fig. 6. Specifically, we consider the fetch task as in Fig. 5(f), where the gripper of the robot arm is used to render a series of 3D coordinates as goals for imitation in training phase. During test, we employ two parameterized complex
curves for the gripper to follow: (x, y, z) = (t sin(t)/50, t cos(t)/50− 1/50,− log(t+ 1)/5) (left) and (x, y, z) = (t/5, cos(t)/5 − 1/5, sin(t)/5) (right). It is worth noting that during training the agent is required to imitate a large number of simple behaviors and has never seen such complex goals before testing. It is observed from Fig. 6 that the imitation curves are almost overlapping with the given expert trajectories, indicating that the agent using GPIM has the potential to learn such compositional structure of goals during training and generalize to new composite goals during test.
Comparison with baselines. For the third question, we compare our method to three baselines: RIG (Nair et al., 2018), DISCERN (Warde-Farley et al., 2018), and L2 Distance. L2 Distance measures the distance between states and goals, where the L2 distance −||st − sg||2/σpixel is considered with a hyperparameter σpixel. Note that 2D navigation with the color-shape goal and object manipulation using text description makes the dimensions of states and goals different, so L2 cannot be used in these two tasks. In RIG, we obtain rewards by using the distances in two embedding
4Definitions of x-y goal, color-shape goal, and environment details are given in Appendix B.2.
spaces and learning two independent VAEs, where one VAE is to encode states and the other is to encode goals. We use the normalized distance to goals 5 as the evaluation metric, where we randomly sampled 50 samples (tasks) from the goal space.
We show the results in Fig. 7 by plotting the normalized distance to goals as a function of the number of actor’s steps, where each curve considers 95% confidence interval in terms of the mean value across three seeds. As observed, our GPIM consistently outperforms baselines in almost all tasks except for the RIG in 2D navigation (x-y goal) due to the simplicity of this task. Particularly, as the task complexity increases from 2D navigation (x-y goal) to 2D navigation (color-shape goal) and eventually object manipulation (mixed x-y goal and color-shape goal), GPIM converges faster than baselines and the performance gap between our GPIM and baselines becomes larger. Moreover, although RIG learns fast on navigation with x-y goal, it fails to accomplish complex navigation with color-shape goal because the embedding distance between two independent VAEs has difficulty in capturing the correlation of heterogeneous states and goals. Especially in high-dimensional action space and on more exploratory tasks (atari and mujoco tasks), our method substantially outperforms the baselines.
To gain more intuition for our method, we record the distance (∆r) between the final state induced by πθ and the goal rendered by πµ throughout the training process of the 2D navigation (x-y goal). For this purpose, in this specific experiment, we update πµ and qφ but ignore the update of πθ before 200 k steps to show the exploration of πµ at the abstract level. As shown in Fig. 8, ∆r steadily increases during the first 200 k steps, indicating that the abstractlevel policy πµ explores the environment (i.e., goal space) to distinguish skills more easily,
and as a result, generates diverse goals for training πθ. After around 1.5 M training steps, ∆r almost comes to 0, indicating that the goal-conditioned policy πθ has learned a good strategy to reach the rendered goals. In Appendix A.2, we visually show the generated goals at the abstract level in more complex tasks, which shows that our straightforward framework can effectively explore the environment without additional sophisticated exploration strategies.
Expressiveness of the reward function. Particularly, the performance of unsupervised RL methods depends on the diversity of autonomously generated goals and the expressiveness of the learned reward function, which is conditioned on the generated goals. We have shown that our straightforward framework can effectively explore the environment, achieving competitive performance with baselines (see appendix A.2). The next question is that: with the same exploration capability to generate goals for training, does our model achieve competitive performance against the baselines? Said another way, will the obtained reward (over embedding space) of baselines taking the prior nonparametric function limit the repertoires of learning tasks in a specific environment? Our next exper-
5Definition and further descriptions can be found in Appendix B.3.
iment studies the expressiveness of the learned reward function. For better graphical interpretation and comparison with baselines, we simplify the complex Atari games to a maze environment shown in Fig. 9, where the middle wall poses a bottleneck state. Campos et al. (2020) shows that the canonical information-theoretic skill discovery methods suffer from a poor coverage of the state space. Here, borrowing the idea from state marginal matching (Lee et al., 2019), we set the reward for the abstract-level policy as (Jabri et al., 2019) r′t = λ [log qφ(ω|st+1)− log p(ω)]+(λ−1) log qν(st+1), where qν is a density model, and λ ∈ [0, 1] can be interpreted as trade off between discriminability of skills and task-specific exploration (here we set λ = 0.5). Note that we modify r′t for improving the exploration on generating goals, and we do not change the reward for training the goal-conditioned policy πθ. To guarantee generation of the same diverse goals for training goal-conditioned policies of baselines, we adopt DIAYN taking the modified reward r′t to generate goals for RIG and DISCERN, denoted as DIAYN+RIG and DIAYN+DISCERN respectively.
In Fig. 9, we show the visualized learned reward on a specific task reaching the left-bottom star, and the learning curves on the maze task, where the testing-goals are random sampled. We can see that the learned reward functions of RIG and DISCERN produce poor signal for the goal-conditioned policy, which makes learning vulnerable to local optima. Our method builds up the reward function after exploring the environment, the dynamic of which itself further shapes the reward function. In Fig. 9 (left), we can see that our model provides the reward function better expressiveness of the task by compensating for the dynamic. This produces that, even with the same exploration capability to generate diverse goals, our model sufficiently outperforms the baselines, as shown in Fig. 9 (right).

heading: 6 CONCLUSION

text: We propose a novel GPIM method to learn goal-conditioned policy in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, we optimize a discriminator in an unsupervised manner for the purpose of reliable exploration to provide the intrinsic reward for the abstract-level policy. The learned discriminator then serves as an intrinsic reward function for the goal-conditioned policy to imitate the trajectory induced by the abstract-level policy. Experiments on a variety of robotic tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method which substantially outperforms prior unsupervised techniques.

heading: A ADDITIONAL EXPERIMENTS

heading: A.1 COMPARISON WITH DIAYN AND ITS VARIANT

text:
In this section, we expect to clarify the difference and connection with DIAYN (Eysenbach et al., 2018) experimentally, and indicate the limitations of maximizing I(s;ω) and maximizing I(s; g) separately on learning goal-conditioned policy.
In DIAYN, authors show the ability of the model to imitate an expert. Given the goal, DIAYN uses the learned discriminator to estimate which skill was most likely to have generated the goal g:
ω̂ = arg max ω
qφ(ω|g). (9)
Here we call this model DIAYN-Imitator. We also directly substitute the perceptually-specific goals for the latent variable in DIAYN’s objective to learn a goal-conditioned policy. We call this model DIAYN-Goal: max I(s; g), (10) where g is sampled from the prior goal distribution p(g). Please note that we do not adopt the prior non-parametric distance as in DISCERN (Warde-Farley et al., 2018) to calculate the reward. We obtain the reward as in normal DIAYN using the variational inference: rt = qφ(gt|st+1). Fig. 10 shows the comparison of our GPIM with DIAYN variants including DIAYN-Imitator and DIAYN-Goal, where the 2D navigation task is considered. As observed, DIAYN-Imitator can reach seen goals but not unseen goals in Fig. 10(a), because it cannot effectively accomplish the interpolation between skills that are induced in training. And behaviors generated by DIAYN-Goal cannot guarantee consistency with the preset goals in Fig. 10(b). The main reason is that this objective only ensures that when g (or ω) is different, the states generated by g (or ω) are different. However, there is no guarantee that g (or ω) and the state generated by the current g (or ω) have semantically consistent behavior information. Our proposed GPIM method, capable of solving interpolation and consistency issues, exhibits the best performance in this 2D navigation task.
Moreover, when the user-specified goals are heterogeneous to the states, the learned discriminator qφ in DIAYN is unable to estimate which skill is capable of inducing given goals. Specifically, when the goals are visual inputs, and the states in training is feature vectors (e.g., joint angles), the learned discriminator is unable to choose the skills due to a lack of models for converting high-dimensional figure into low-dimensional feature vectors. On the contrary, there are lots of off-the-shelf models to render low-dimensional feature vectors into perceptually-specific high-dimensional inputs (Tobin et al., 2017; Khirodkar et al., 2018).

heading: A.2 AUTOMATED GOAL-GENERATION FOR EXPLORATION

text:
In general, for unsupervised RL, we would like to ask the agent to carry out autonomous ”practice” during training phase, where we do not know which particular goals will be provided in test phase.
In order to maximize the state coverage, the ability to automatically explore the environment and discover diverse goals is crucial. In this section, we will further analyze the goal distribution of three methods (RIG (Nair et al., 2018), DISCERN (Warde-Farley et al., 2018), GPIM) in a new 2D obstacle navigation task as shown in Fig. 11(a), Fig. 11(b), and Fig. 11(c). The size of the environment is 10 × 10, the initial state is set as [5, 2], and there are two obstacles that prevent the agent from passing through each of which is 3× 6 in size. DISCERN samples goals during training by maintaining a fixed sized buffer G of past observations. We simply mimic the process of goal generation by taking random actions for 20 environment steps after initialization of the method. As in Fig. 11(b), we generate 100 goals with different colors. We can see that the majority of goals locate between the two obstacles, which limits the further exploration of the environment.
RIG samples a representation (latent goals zg) from the learned VAE prior, which represents a distribution over latent goals and state observation. The policy network takes the representation as a substitute for the user-specified goal. For a clear visualization of the distribution of the sampled latent goals, we further feed the sampled latent goals into the decoder to obtain the real goals in the user-specified space. The decoded latent goals are shown in Fig. 11(a), where we sample 30 goals. It is shown that the majority of goals are also between the two obstacles because the goals for training the VAE prior come from the same distribution as in DISCERN.
Our method, GPIM, obtains goals from the behaviors induced by the abstract-level policy. Maximizing I(s;ω) encourages different skills to induce different states that are further rendered to goals. This objective ensures that each skill individually is distinct and the skills collectively explore large parts of the state space (Eysenbach et al., 2018). As shown in Fig. 11(c), our method provides better coverage of the state space than DISCERN and RIG.
Fig. 11(d) shows the performance of the three methods, where we randomly sample goals from the whole state (or goal) space at test phase. We can see that our method significantly outperforms the baselines. The most common failure mode for prior methods is that the goal distribution col-
lapses (Pong et al., 2019), causing that the agent can reach only a fraction of the state space, as shown in Fig. 11(a) and 11(b).
Exploration is a well-studied problem in the field of RL, and there are many proven approaches with different benefits to improve the exploration (Colas et al., 2018; Campos et al., 2020). Note that these benefits are orthogonal to those provided by our straightforward GPIM, and these approaches could be combined with GPIM for even greater effect. We leave combing our method with sophisticated exploration strategies to future work.
A.3 ABLATION STUDY
Here we conduct the ablation study on 2D navigation task to analyze how the disentanglement of goals in GPIM affects the learned behaviors in terms of the generalization to new tasks?. For convenience, we remove certain component from GPIM and define the new method as follows: w/o Rec - removing the reconstruction loss (i.e. α = 0); w/o KL - removing the KL loss (i.e. β = 0); w/o Pol - removing the policy loss updating ϑE as shown in Fig. 3.
The performance is reported in Fig. 12. It is observed that w/o. Pol performs worse than all other methods, which is consistent with the performance of RIG that trains VAE and policy separately. The main reason is that the disentanglement fails to figure out the required latent factors on given tasks. Moreover, although GPIM has a similar performance with the other three methods on 2D navigation task, GPIM has better interpretability to behaviors. As shown at the bottom of Fig. 12, considering a series of goals from the first red to the last green (left) in a counterclockwise order, GPIM can successfully disentangle them and learn effective latent z (right), but w/o KL fails to keep the original order of goals (middle).
Ablation study on mujoco tasks. We further study the impact of disentanglement part in our framework. The performance is reported in Fig. 13. It is observed that w/o Pol performs worse than all other methods, which is consistent with the performance in 2D navigation task6. And we can find that when we remove the reconstruction loss (α = 0), the performance of w/o Rec degrades in these three environments. The main reason is that the process of learning generative factors become more difficult without the supervised reconstruction loss. While in 2D navigation task, the reconstruction loss has little impact on the performance. Even though that w/o KL has a similar performance with our full GPIM method, GPIM demonstrates better interpretability to behaviors as shown in Fig. 10(c).
6The results of 2D navigation task are shown in the full paper.

heading: A.4 GENERALIZATION ON THE GRIDWORLD TASK

text:
Here we introduce an illustrative example of gridworld task and then show the generalization when the dynamics and goal conditions are missing in the gridworld task.
Illustrative example. We start with a simple gridworld example: the environment is shown on the left of Fig. 14, where the goal for the agent is to navigate from the middle to the given colored room. By abstract-level training, our method quickly acquire four skills to reach different rooms. Each time the agent arrives in a room induced by πµ, we train πθ conditioned on the room’s color (e.g., green), allowing the agent to be guided to the same room by the cur-
rent reward function. The learning process is shown on the right of Fig. 14. It is concluded that the agent can automatically learn how to complete tasks given semantic goals in an unsupervised manner.
Generalization on the gridworld task. We further show the generalization when the dynamics and goal conditions are missing in the gridworld task, where there are four rooms in different colors: blue, green, orange and magenta. We consider the situation where we train the goal-conditioned policy in the blue room, the green room and the orange room, and test in the magenta room.
As shown in Fig. 15, we quickly acquire four skills for different rooms through the training at the abstract level. After the agent reaches at the colored rooms, we rendered the corresponding room as a two-bit representation: Render(’blue’) = 10, Render(’green’) = 00, and Render(’orange’) = 01 ; we do not render the magenta room. We take the magenta room corresponding to 11 as the test goal to verify the generalization ability.
In lower part of Fig. 15, we show the learning process of the goal-conditioned policy. We can find that the blue room tasks are learned quickly, and the green and magenta room tasks are learned relatively slowly, but the agent is still able to complete the test task successfully (the magenta room). Compared to the task in Fig. 14 that renders all the rooms as goals, the whole learning process in Fig. 15 is much slower. We hypothesize that the main reason is that the agent needs to further infer the relationship between different goals. The lack of goal information (i.e., missing magenta 11) leads to a lower efficiency and unstable training.
B IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS

heading: B.1 DERIVATION OF THE VARIATION BOUND

text:
Eω,s,s̃ [log p(ω|s) + log p(ω|s̃)− 2 log p(ω)] = Eω,s,s̃ [log qφ(ω|s) + log qφ(ω|s̃)− 2 log p(ω)]
+KL(p(ω|s)||qφ(ω|s)) +KL(p(ω|s̃)||qφ(ω|s̃)) ≥ Eω,s,s̃ [log qφ(ω|s) + log qφ(ω|s̃)− 2 log p(ω)]

heading: B.2 ENVIRONMENT DETAILS

text:
We introduce the details of environments and tasks here, including the environment setting of 2D navigation (x-y goal and color-shape goal), object manipulation, three atari games (seaquest, berzerk and montezuma revenge), and the mujoco tasks (swimmer, half cheetah and fetch).
2D navigation tasks: In 2D navigation tasks, the agent moves in each of the four cardinal directions, where the states denote the 2D location of the agent. We consider the following two tasks: moving the agent to a specific coordinate named x-y goal and moving the agent to a specific object with certain color and shape named color-shape goal.
• 2D Navigation (x-y goal): The size of the environment is 10× 10 (continuous state space) or 7 × 7 (discrete state space). The state is the location of the agent, and the goal is the location of the final location.
• 2D Navigation (color-shape goal): The size of the environment is 10 × 10. The state consists of the locations of the agent and three objects with different color-shape pairs (one real target and two distractors). The goal is described by the color and shape of the real target, encoded with one-hot.
Object manipulation: More complex manipulation considers a moving agent in 2D environment with one block for manipulation, and the other as a distractor. The agent first needs to reach the block and then move the block to the given location, where the block is described using color and shape. The size of the environment is 10 × 10. The state consists of the locations of the agent and two blocks with different color-shape pairs (one real target and one distractor). The goal consists of the one-hot encoding of the color-shape of the target block that needs to be moved, and the 2D coordinate of the final location of the movement.
Atari games: We test the performance on three atari games: seaquest, berzerk, and montezuma revenge. In order to reduce the difficulty of training, we adopt the RAM-environment (i.e., Seaquestram-v0, Berzerk-ram-v0, and MontezumaRevenge-ram-v0), where each state represents a 128- dimensional vector. Each action repeatedly performs for a duration of k frames, where k is uniformly sampled from Table 1.
Mujoco tasks: We consider to make diverse agents to fast imitate a given goal trajectory, including the imitation of behaviors of a swimmer, a half cheetah, and a fetch, where the states in the trajectory denote the positions of agents. Such experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in learning behaviors over a continuous high-dimensional action space, which is more complicated in physics than the 2D navigation.
Note that the goals in all the experiments are images 50× 50× 3 (3 channels, RGB) in size, except that the color-shape goal is encoded with one-hot.

heading: B.3 METRICS, NETWORK ARCHITECTURES AND HYPERPARAMETERS

text:
Here we give a clear definition of our evaluation metric – ”normalized distance to goal”:
I: When the goal is to reach the final state of the trajectory induced by πµ (Figs. 5(a), 5(b) and 5(c)), the distance to goal is the L2-distance between the final state s̃kT−1 induced by πθ(·|·, gk) and the goal state gk randomly sampled from the goal (task) space:
Dis = 1
N N∑ k=1 L2(s̃kT−1, g k),
where N is the number of testing samples. We set N = 50 for 2D navigation, object manipulation and atari games (seaquest, berzerk and montezuma revenge).
II: When the goal is to imitate the whole trajectory induced by πµ (Figs. 5(d), 5(e) and 5(f)), the distance is the expectation of distance over the whole trajectory {s̃k0 , s̃k1 , ..., s̃kT−1} induced by πθ(·|·, {gk0 , gk1 , ..., gkT−1}) and goal trajectory {gk0 , gk1 , ..., gkT−1} randomly sampled from the trajectory (task) space:
Dis = 1
N N∑ k=1
( 1
T T−1∑ t=0 L2(s̃kt , g k t )
) ,
where N is the number of testing samples. We set N = 50 for mujoco tasks (swimmer, half cheetah and fetch) .
The term ”normalized” means that the distance is divided by a scale factor.
Note that, for three atari games (seaquest, berzerk, and montezuma revenge), the L2-distance for evaluation7 is the difference between the position of controllable agent and the target’s position, where the position is obtained by matching the pixel on the imaged state. See the Python code below.
def obtainxy_seaquest(img): temp = np.where((img[:,:,0]==187)&(img[:,:,1]==187)&(img[:,:,2]==53)) global seaquestxy if len(temp[0])==0:
temp = seaquestxy else:
seaquestxy = temp xy = np.array([np.mean(temp[0]), np.mean(temp[1])])/100
return xy
def obtainxy_montezuma_revenge(img): img[:20] = 0 temp = np.where((img[:,:,0]==200)&(imgo[:,:,1]==72)&(img[:,:,2]==72)) global montezumaxy if len(temp[0])==0:
temp = montezumaxy else:
montezumaxy = temp xy = np.array([np.mean(temp[0]), np.mean(temp[1])])/100
return xy
def obtainxy_berzerk(img): temp = np.array(img) temp[1:-1, 1:-1] = temp[:-2, :-2]/3+temp[2:,2:]/3+temp[1:-1,1:-1]/3 temp = np.where((temp[:,:,0]==240)&(temp[:,:,1]==170)&(temp[:,:,2]==103
)) global berzerkxy if len(temp[0])==0:
temp = berzerkxy else:
berzerkxy = temp xy = np.array([np.mean(temp[0]), np.mean(temp[1])])/100
return xy
In our implementation, we use two independent SAC architectures (Haarnoja et al., 2018) for abstract-level policy πµ and goal-conditioned policy πθ. We find empirically that having two networks share a portion of the network structure will degrade the experimental performance. We adopt universal value function approximates (UVFAs) (Schaul et al., 2015) for extra input (goals). For the abstract-level policy πµ, to pass latent variable ω to the Q function, value function, and policy, as in DIAYN, we simply concatenate ω with the current state st (and action at). For goal-conditioned
7The reward function for our baseline L2 Distance still calculates the L2-distance directly on the original state space, instead of the distance of the agents’ positions after pixel matching here.
policy πθ, we also concatenate gt with current state s̃t (and action at). We update the ϑE using the gradients from both the Dis loss and Q function’s loss of the goal-conditioned policy πθ.
The hyper-parameters are presented in Table 2.

heading: C BROADER IMPACT

text:
The main concern in the research area of goal-conditioned policy is how to find numerous diverse goals as well as obtain the reward function. Particularly, in practical application, the goal and state are often heterogeneous data with high variability of data types and formats, which further aggravates the difficulty of policy learning. Our model addresses these problems by allowing agents to interact with objects or environment, and learn the behaviors in a fully autonomous way on the basis of intrinsic motivations. Bridging with the render function between abstract level and goal-conditioned policy, we could obtain diverse and versatile policies. By optimizing the intrinsic reward, our GPIM makes an agent capable of solving diverse tasks, which fits for wide-range applications such as quick imitation on behavior states, interactive navigation and object manipulation, and so on.
Moreover, our model provides an approach to address the Robot open-Ended Autonomous Learning (REAL). This framework is likely to speed up the progress of the general-purpose robots that can achieve complex tasks given the corresponding goals, and drive the development of autonomous robot learning in a life-long learning mode.
By autonomous exploration of the environment, the agent is likely to generate some useful behaviors as well as the majority of useless skills. Of particular concern is that the use of autonomous exploration is likely to generate a strategy that will induce dire consequences, such as a collision skill in an autonomous driving environment. How to generate useful behaviors for user-specified tasks and how to use these induced skills are also open problems. An alternative solution is to use an extrinsic reward to guide the exploration or the offline reinforcement learning (Levine et al., 2020). While another issue comes from the exploration-exploitation trade-off. We would encourage further work to understand the limitations of REAL interacting with the environment autonomously. We would also encourage research to understand the risks arising from autonomous robot learning.
Another limitation is that our learning framework needs an extra abstract-level policy training for rendering goals and providing a reward function. This requires twice as much interaction time with the environment as learning a single policy network. For practical application, a simulation platform is preferred for pre-training. We also encourage researchers to mitigate the difference between the simulation platform and the actual environment. We also pursue the effective models of transfer learning.

heading: D MORE RESULTS

heading: D.1 LEARNED BEHAVIORS ON TEMPORALLY-EXTENDED TASKS

text: More experimental results are given in Fig. 16 to show the imitation on several temporally-extended tasks.

heading: D.2 LEARNED BEHAVIORS FROM GPIM

text: More experimental results are given in Fig. 17 to show the learned behaviors on 2D navigation, object manipulation, three atari games (seaquest, berzerk and montezuma revenge), and the mujoco tasks (swimmer, half cheetah and fetch). Videos are available under https://sites.google.com/view/gpim.