Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning via Multi-View Information Bottleneck

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents are often sensitive to visual changes that were unseen in their training environments. To address this problem, we introduce a robust representation learning approach for RL. We introduce an auxiliary objective based on the multi-view information bottleneck (MIB) principle which encourages learning representations that are both predictive of the future and less sensitive to task-irrelevant distractions. This enables us to train high-performance policies that are robust to visual distractions and can generalize to unseen environments. We demonstrate that our approach can achieve SOTA performance on challenging visual control tasks, even when the background is replaced with natural videos. In addition, we show that our approach outperforms well-established baselines on generalization to unseen environments using the large-scale Procgen benchmark.