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Poster

Playing hard exploration games by watching YouTube

Yusuf Aytar · Tobias Pfaff · David Budden · Thomas Paine · Ziyu Wang · Nando de Freitas

Room 517 AB #142

Keywords: [ Exploration ] [ Reinforcement Learning ] [ Game Playing ] [ Reinforcement Learning and Planning ] [ Deep Learning ]


Abstract:

Deep reinforcement learning methods traditionally struggle with tasks where environment rewards are particularly sparse. One successful method of guiding exploration in these domains is to imitate trajectories provided by a human demonstrator. However, these demonstrations are typically collected under artificial conditions, i.e. with access to the agent’s exact environment setup and the demonstrator’s action and reward trajectories. Here we propose a method that overcomes these limitations in two stages. First, we learn to map unaligned videos from multiple sources to a common representation using self-supervised objectives constructed over both time and modality (i.e. vision and sound). Second, we embed a single YouTube video in this representation to learn a reward function that encourages an agent to imitate human gameplay. This method of one-shot imitation allows our agent to convincingly exceed human-level performance on the infamously hard exploration games Montezuma’s Revenge, Pitfall! and Private Eye for the first time, even if the agent is not presented with any environment rewards.

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