Mega-Reward: Achieving Human-Level Play without Extrinsic Rewards

Understand

Intrinsic rewards were introduced to simulate how human intelligence works; they are usually evaluated by intrinsically-motivated play, i.e., playing games without extrinsic rewards but evaluated with extrinsic rewards.

• However, none of the existing intrinsic reward approaches can achieve human-level performance under this very challenging setting of intrinsically-motivated play.
• In this work, we propose a novel megalomania-driven intrinsic reward (called mega-reward), which, to our knowledge, is the first approach that achieves human-level performance in intrinsically-motivated play.
• Intuitively, mega-reward comes from the observation that infants' intelligence develops when they try to gain more control on entities in an environment; therefore, mega-reward aims to maximize the control capabilities of agents on given entities in a given environment.