Relative Variational Intrinsic Control

Understand

In the absence of external rewards, agents can still learn useful behaviors by identifying and mastering a set of diverse skills within their environment.

• Existing skill learning methods use mutual information objectives to incentivize each skill to be diverse and distinguishable from the rest.
• However, if care is not taken to constrain the ways in which the skills are diverse, trivially diverse skill sets can arise.
• To ensure useful skill diversity, we propose a novel skill learning objective, Relative Variational Intrinsic Control (RVIC), which incentivizes learning skills that are distinguishable in how they change the agent's relationship to its environment.