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COBRA: Data-Efficient Model-Based RL through Unsupervised Object Discovery and Curiosity-Driven Exploration

22 May 2019arXiv:1905.09275archive 2025-07-28

Nicholas Watters, Loic Matthey, Matko Bosnjak, Christopher P. Burgess, Alexander Lerchner

Data efficiency and robustness to task-irrelevant perturbations are long-standing challenges for deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Here we introduce a modular approach to addressing these challenges in a continuous control environment, without using hand-crafted or supervised information. Our Curious Object-Based seaRch Agent (COBRA) uses task-free intrinsically motivated exploration and unsupervised learning to build object-based models of its environment and action space. Subsequently, it can learn a variety of tasks through model-based search in very few steps and excel on structured hold-out tests of policy robustness.

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