Leveraging Separated World Model for Exploration in Visually Distracted Environments

Model-based unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) has gained prominence for reducing environment interactions and learning general skills using intrinsic rewards. However, distractors in observations can severely affect intrinsic reward estimation, leading to a biased exploration process, especially in environments with visual inputs like images or videos. To address this challenge, we propose a bi-level optimization framework named Separation-assisted eXplorer (SeeX). In the inner optimization, SeeX trains a separated world model to extract exogenous and endogenous information, minimizing uncertainty to ensure task relevance. In the outer optimization, it learns a policy on imaginary trajectories generated within the endogenous state space to maximize task-relevant uncertainty. Evaluations on multiple locomotion and manipulation tasks demonstrate SeeX's effectiveness.