Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning with Neural Reward Functions

Inspired by the great success of unsupervised learning in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing, the Reinforcement Learning community has recently started to focus more on unsupervised discovery of skills. Most current approaches, like DIAYN or DADS, optimize some form of mutual information objective. We propose a different approach that uses reward functions encoded by neural networks. These are trained iteratively to reward more complex behavior. In high-dimensional robotic environments our approach learns a wide range of interesting skills including front-flips for Half-Cheetah and one-legged running for Humanoid. In the pixel-based Montezuma's Revenge environment our method also works with minimal changes and it learns complex skills that involve interacting with items and visiting diverse locations. A web version of this paper which shows animations for the different skills is available in https://as.inf.ethz.ch/research/open_ended_RL/main.html