Learning to Actively Reduce Memory Requirements for Robot Control Tasks
This work addresses memory efficiency for robots with rich sensing in long-horizon tasks, offering a general approach that is incremental over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of high memory requirements in robot control tasks by jointly synthesizing memory representations and policies to actively reduce memory usage, demonstrating improved generalization and low-dimensional memory reliance in simulated navigation tasks.
Robots equipped with rich sensing modalities (e.g., RGB-D cameras) performing long-horizon tasks motivate the need for policies that are highly memory-efficient. State-of-the-art approaches for controlling robots often use memory representations that are excessively rich for the task or rely on hand-crafted tricks for memory efficiency. Instead, this work provides a general approach for jointly synthesizing memory representations and policies; the resulting policies actively seek to reduce memory requirements. Specifically, we present a reinforcement learning framework that leverages an implementation of the group LASSO regularization to synthesize policies that employ low-dimensional and task-centric memory representations. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with simulated examples including navigation in discrete and continuous spaces as well as vision-based indoor navigation set in a photo-realistic simulator. The results on these examples indicate that our method is capable of finding policies that rely only on low-dimensional memory representations, improving generalization, and actively reducing memory requirements.