Diversity Induced Environment Design via Self-Play
This work addresses the problem of inefficient and limited environment generation in adaptive curriculum learning for AI agents, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior UED frameworks.
The paper tackles the challenge of designing effective environment distributions for training generally capable agents by introducing diversity into the Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) framework, resulting in improved performance over existing methods.
Recent work on designing an appropriate distribution of environments has shown promise for training effective generally capable agents. Its success is partly because of a form of adaptive curriculum learning that generates environment instances (or levels) at the frontier of the agent's capabilities. However, such an environment design framework often struggles to find effective levels in challenging design spaces and requires costly interactions with the environment. In this paper, we aim to introduce diversity in the Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) framework. Specifically, we propose a task-agnostic method to identify observed/hidden states that are representative of a given level. The outcome of this method is then utilized to characterize the diversity between two levels, which as we show can be crucial to effective performance. In addition, to improve sampling efficiency, we incorporate the self-play technique that allows the environment generator to automatically generate environments that are of great benefit to the training agent. Quantitatively, our approach, Diversity-induced Environment Design via Self-Play (DivSP), shows compelling performance over existing methods.