Papers › Self-Paced Deep Reinforcement Learning

Self-Paced Deep Reinforcement Learning

24 Apr 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2004.11812archive 2025-07-28

Pascal Klink, Carlo D'Eramo, Jan Peters, Joni Pajarinen

Curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) improves the learning speed and stability of an agent by exposing it to a tailored series of tasks throughout learning. Despite empirical successes, an open question in CRL is how to automatically generate a curriculum for a given reinforcement learning (RL) agent, avoiding manual design. In this paper, we propose an answer by interpreting the curriculum generation as an inference problem, where distributions over tasks are progressively learned to approach the target task. This approach leads to an automatic curriculum generation, whose pace is controlled by the agent, with solid theoretical motivation and easily integrated with deep RL algorithms. In the conducted experiments, the curricula generated with the proposed algorithm significantly improve learning performance across several environments and deep RL algorithms, matching or outperforming state-of-the-art existing CRL algorithms.

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Deep Reinforcement LearningOpen-Ended Question AnsweringReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

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