Papers › Leave no Trace: Learning to Reset for Safe and Autonomous Reinforcement Learning

Leave no Trace: Learning to Reset for Safe and Autonomous Reinforcement Learning

18 Nov 2017ICLR 2018 1arXiv:1711.06782archive 2025-07-28

Benjamin Eysenbach, Shixiang Gu, Julian Ibarz, Sergey Levine

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can learn complex behavioral skills, but real-world application of these methods requires a large amount of experience to be collected by the agent. In practical settings, such as robotics, this involves repeatedly attempting a task, resetting the environment between each attempt. However, not all tasks are easily or automatically reversible. In practice, this learning process requires extensive human intervention. In this work, we propose an autonomous method for safe and efficient reinforcement learning that simultaneously learns a forward and reset policy, with the reset policy resetting the environment for a subsequent attempt. By learning a value function for the reset policy, we can automatically determine when the forward policy is about to enter a non-reversible state, providing for uncertainty-aware safety aborts. Our experiments illustrate that proper use of the reset policy can greatly reduce the number of manual resets required to learn a task, can reduce the number of unsafe actions that lead to non-reversible states, and can automatically induce a curriculum.

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Deep Reinforcement LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

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