2016

Reset-Free Guided Policy Search: Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic Initial States

Montgomery, William, Ajay, Anurag, Finn, Chelsea et al.

Understand

Autonomous learning of robotic skills can allow general-purpose robots to learn wide behavioral repertoires without requiring extensive manual engineering.

  • However, robotic skill learning methods typically make one of several trade-offs to enable practical real-world learning, such as requiring manually designed policy or value function representations, initialization from human-provided demonstrations, instrumentation of the training environment, or extremely long training times.
  • In this paper, we propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for learning manipulation skills that can train general-purpose neural network policies with minimal human engineering, while still allowing for fast, efficient learning in stochastic environments.
  • Our approach builds on the guided policy search (GPS) algorithm, which transforms the reinforcement learning problem into supervised learning from a computational teacher (without human demonstrations).

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