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Deep Reinforcement Learning for Complex Manipulation Tasks with Sparse Feedback

Binyamin Manela
- 12 Jan 2020 - 
TLDR
This thesis presents three algorithms based on the existing HER algorithm that improves its performances and enables the learning of complex, sequential, tasks using a form of curriculum learning combined with HER.
Abstract
Learning optimal policies from sparse feedback is a known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) is a multi-goal reinforcement learning algorithm that comes to solve such tasks. The algorithm treats every failure as a success for an alternative (virtual) goal that has been achieved in the episode and then generalizes from that virtual goal to real goals. HER has known flaws and is limited to relatively simple tasks. In this thesis, we present three algorithms based on the existing HER algorithm that improves its performances. First, we prioritize virtual goals from which the agent will learn more valuable information. We call this property the \textit{instructiveness} of the virtual goal and define it by a heuristic measure, which expresses how well the agent will be able to generalize from that virtual goal to actual goals. Secondly, we designed a filtering process that detects and removes misleading samples that may induce bias throughout the learning process. Lastly, we enable the learning of complex, sequential, tasks using a form of curriculum learning combined with HER. We call this algorithm \textit{Curriculum HER}. To test our algorithms, we built three challenging manipulation environments with sparse reward functions. Each environment has three levels of complexity. Our empirical results show vast improvement in the final success rate and sample efficiency when compared to the original HER algorithm.

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References
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TL;DR: This book provides a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning, which ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications.
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TL;DR: Back-propagation repeatedly adjusts the weights of the connections in the network so as to minimize a measure of the difference between the actual output vector of the net and the desired output vector, which helps to represent important features of the task domain.
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Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning

TL;DR: This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.
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Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms

TL;DR: A new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent, are proposed.
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Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: This work presents the first deep learning model to successfully learn control policies directly from high-dimensional sensory input using reinforcement learning, which outperforms all previous approaches on six of the games and surpasses a human expert on three of them.
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