title: Rewardless Open-Ended Learning (ROEL)
abstract: Open-ended learning algorithms aim to automatically generate challenges and solutions to an unending sequence of learning opportunities. In Reinforcement Learning (RL) recent approaches to open-ended learning, such as Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET), focus on collecting a diverse set of solutions based on the novelty of an agents pre-defined reward function. In many practical RL tasks defining an effective reward function a priori is often hard and can hinder an agents ability to explore many behaviors that could ultimately be more performant. In this work we combine open-ended learning with unsupervised reinforcement learning to train agents to learn a diverse set of complex skills. We propose a procedure to combine skill-discovery via mutual information, using the POET algorithm as an open-ended framework to teach agents increasingly complex groups of diverse skills. Experimentally we demonstrate this approach yields agents capable of demonstrating identifiable skills over a range of environments, that can be extracted and utilized to solve a variety of tasks.
authors: Alexander Quessy Thomas Stuart Richardson
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