{"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/unsupervised-learning-and-exploration-of","title":"Unsupervised Learning and Exploration of Reachable Outcome Space","arxiv_id":"1909.05508","date":"2019-09-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Giuseppe Paolo","Alban Laflaquière","Alexandre Coninx","Stephane Doncieux"],"abstract":"Performing Reinforcement Learning in sparse rewards settings, with very little prior knowledge, is a challenging problem since there is no signal to properly guide the learning process. In such situations, a good search strategy is fundamental. At the same time, not having to adapt the algorithm to every single problem is very desirable. Here we introduce TAXONS, a Task Agnostic eXploration of Outcome spaces through Novelty and Surprise algorithm. Based on a population-based divergent-search approach, it learns a set of diverse policies directly from high-dimensional observations, without any task-specific information. TAXONS builds a repertoire of policies while training an autoencoder on the high-dimensional observation of the final state of the system to build a low-dimensional outcome space. The learned outcome space, combined with the reconstruction error, is used to drive the search for new policies. Results show that TAXONS can find a diverse set of controllers, covering a good part of the ground-truth outcome space, while having no information about such space.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05508v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.05508v4.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":"unsupervised-learning-and-exploration-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/GPaolo/taxons","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1909.05508","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}