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Poster
Dynamic Bottleneck for Robust Self-Supervised Exploration
Chenjia Bai · Lingxiao Wang · Lei Han · Animesh Garg · Jianye Hao · Peng Liu · Zhaoran Wang

Tue Dec 07 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @ Virtual

Exploration methods based on pseudo-count of transitions or curiosity of dynamics have achieved promising results in solving reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. However, such methods are usually sensitive to environmental dynamics-irrelevant information, e.g., white-noise. To handle such dynamics-irrelevant information, we propose a Dynamic Bottleneck (DB) model, which attains a dynamics-relevant representation based on the information-bottleneck principle. Based on the DB model, we further propose DB-bonus, which encourages the agent to explore state-action pairs with high information gain. We establish theoretical connections between the proposed DB-bonus, the upper confidence bound (UCB) for linear case, and the visiting count for tabular case. We evaluate the proposed method on Atari suits with dynamics-irrelevant noises. Our experiments show that exploration with DB bonus outperforms several state-of-the-art exploration methods in noisy environments.

Author Information

Chenjia Bai (Harbin Institute of Technology)
Lingxiao Wang (Northwestern University)
Lei Han (Tencent AI Lab)
Animesh Garg (University of Toronto, Nvidia, Vector Institute)

I am a Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of Toronto and a Faculty Member at the Vector Institute. I work on machine learning for perception and control in robotics.

Jianye Hao (Tianjin University)
Peng Liu (Harbin Institute of Technology)
Zhaoran Wang (Princeton University)

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