H. Jin Kim

Seungjae Lee, Daesol Cho, Jonghae Park et al.

Recent curriculum Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown notable progress in solving complex tasks by proposing sequences of surrogate tasks. However, the previous approaches often face challenges when they generate curriculum goals in a high-dimensional space. Thus, they usually rely on manually specified goal spaces. To alleviate this limitation and improve the scalability of the curriculum, we propose a novel curriculum method that automatically defines the semantic goal space which contains vital information for the curriculum process, and suggests curriculum goals over it. To define the semantic goal space, our method discretizes continuous observations via vector quantized-variational autoencoders (VQ-VAE) and restores the temporal relations between the discretized observations by a graph. Concurrently, ours suggests uncertainty and temporal distance-aware curriculum goals that converges to the final goals over the automatically composed goal space. We demonstrate that the proposed method allows efficient explorations in an uninformed environment with raw goal examples only. Also, ours outperforms the state-of-the-art curriculum RL methods on data efficiency and performance, in various goal-reaching tasks even with ego-centric visual inputs.

Dohyun Jang, Jaehyun Yoo, Clark Youngdong Son et al.

This paper proposes a cooperative environmental learning algorithm working in a fully distributed manner. A multi-robot system is more effective for exploration tasks than a single robot, but it involves the following challenges: 1) online distributed learning of environmental map using multiple robots; 2) generation of safe and efficient exploration path based on the learned map; and 3) maintenance of the scalability with respect to the number of robots. To this end, we divide the entire process into two stages of environmental learning and path planning. Distributed algorithms are applied in each stage and combined through communication between adjacent robots. The environmental learning algorithm uses a distributed Gaussian process, and the path planning algorithm uses a distributed Monte Carlo tree search. As a result, we build a scalable system without the constraint on the number of robots. Simulation results demonstrate the performance and scalability of the proposed system. Moreover, a real-world-dataset-based simulation validates the utility of our algorithm in a more realistic scenario.