Spectrum Random Masking for Generalization in Image-based Reinforcement Learning

Generalization in image-based reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a robust policy that could be applied directly on unseen visual environments, which is a challenging task since agents usually tend to overfit to their training environment. To handle this problem, a natural approach is to increase the data diversity by image based augmentations. However, different with most vision tasks such as classification and detection, RL tasks are not always invariant to spatial based augmentations due to the entanglement of environment dynamics and visual appearance. In this paper, we argue with two principles for augmentations in RL: First, the augmented observations should facilitate learning a universal policy, which is robust to various distribution shifts. Second, the augmented data should be invariant to the learning signals such as action and reward. Following these rules, we revisit image-based RL tasks from the view of frequency domain and propose a novel augmentation method, namely Spectrum Random Masking (SRM),which is able to help agents to learn the whole frequency spectrum of observation for coping with various distributions and compatible with the pre-collected action and reward corresponding to original observation. Extensive experiments conducted on DMControl Generalization Benchmark demonstrate the proposed SRM achieves the state-of-the-art performance with strong generalization potentials.