{"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/meld-meta-reinforcement-learning-from-images","title":"MELD: Meta-Reinforcement Learning from Images via Latent State Models","arxiv_id":"2010.13957","date":"2020-10-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tony Z. Zhao","Anusha Nagabandi","Kate Rakelly","Chelsea Finn","Sergey Levine"],"abstract":"Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable autonomous agents, such as robots, to quickly acquire new behaviors by leveraging prior experience in a set of related training tasks. However, the onerous data requirements of meta-training compounded with the challenge of learning from sensory inputs such as images have made meta-RL challenging to apply to real robotic systems. Latent state models, which learn compact state representations from a sequence of observations, can accelerate representation learning from visual inputs. In this paper, we leverage the perspective of meta-learning as task inference to show that latent state models can \\emph{also} perform meta-learning given an appropriately defined observation space. Building on this insight, we develop meta-RL with latent dynamics (MELD), an algorithm for meta-RL from images that performs inference in a latent state model to quickly acquire new skills given observations and rewards. MELD outperforms prior meta-RL methods on several simulated image-based robotic control problems, and enables a real WidowX robotic arm to insert an Ethernet cable into new locations given a sparse task completion signal after only $8$ hours of real world meta-training. To our knowledge, MELD is the first meta-RL algorithm trained in a real-world robotic control setting from images.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.13957v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.13957v2.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":"meld-meta-reinforcement-learning-from-images","repo_url":"https://github.com/tonyzhaozh/meld","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"meta-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Meta Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"representation-learning","task_name":"Representation Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2010.13957","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}