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Poster
Novelty Search in Representational Space for Sample Efficient Exploration
Ruo Yu Tao · Vincent Francois-Lavet · Joelle Pineau

Mon Dec 07 09:00 PM -- 11:00 PM (PST) @ Poster Session 0 #151
in Poster Session 1 »

We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the distance of nearest neighbors in the low dimensional representational space to gauge novelty. We then leverage these intrinsic rewards for sample-efficient exploration with planning routines in representational space for hard exploration tasks with sparse rewards. One key element of our approach is the use of information theoretic principles to shape our representations in a way so that our novelty reward goes beyond pixel similarity. We test our approach on a number of maze tasks, as well as a control problem and show that our exploration approach is more sample-efficient compared to strong baselines.

Author Information

Ruo Yu Tao (University of Alberta)
Vincent Francois-Lavet (VU Amsterdam)
Joelle Pineau (McGill University)

Joelle Pineau is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University where she co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab. She also leads the Facebook AI Research lab in Montreal, Canada. She holds a BASc in Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and an MSc and PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Pineau's research focuses on developing new models and algorithms for planning and learning in complex partially-observable domains. She also works on applying these algorithms to complex problems in robotics, health care, games and conversational agents. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and the Journal of Machine Learning Research and is currently President of the International Machine Learning Society. She is a recipient of NSERC's E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2018), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and in 2016 was named a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists by the Royal Society of Canada.

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