{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-novel-approach-to-curiosity-and-explainable","title":"A Novel Approach to Curiosity and Explainable Reinforcement Learning via Interpretable Sub-Goals","arxiv_id":"2104.06630","date":"2021-04-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Connor van Rossum","Candice Feinberg","Adam Abu Shumays","Kyle Baxter","Benedek Bartha"],"abstract":"Two key challenges within Reinforcement Learning involve improving (a) agent learning within environments with sparse extrinsic rewards and (b) the explainability of agent actions. We describe a curious subgoal focused agent to address both these challenges. We use a novel method for curiosity produced from a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based model of environment transitions that is robust to stochastic environment transitions. Additionally, we use a subgoal generating network to guide navigation. The explainability of the agent's behavior is increased by decomposing complex tasks into a sequence of interpretable subgoals that do not require any manual design. We show that this method also enables the agent to solve challenging procedurally-generated tasks that contain stochastic transitions above other state-of-the-art methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06630v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.06630v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-novel-approach-to-curiosity-and-explainable","repo_url":"https://github.com/connor-vr/Interpretable-Sub-Goal-RL","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Generative Adversarial Network"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}