Episodic Curiosity through Reachability
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Rewards are sparse in the real world and most today's reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. One solution to this problem is to allow the agent to create rewards for itself - thus making rewards dense and more suitable for learning. In particular, inspired by curious behaviour in animals, observing something novel could be rewarded with a bonus. Such bonus is summed up with the real task reward - making it possible for RL algorithms to learn from the combined reward. We propose a new curiosity method which uses episodic memory to form the novelty bonus. To determine the bonus, the current observation is compared with the observations in memory. Crucially, the comparison is done based on how many environment steps it takes to reach the current observation from those in memory - which incorporates rich information about environment dynamics. This allows us to overcome the known "couch-potato" issues of prior work - when the agent finds a way to instantly gratify itself by exploiting actions which lead to unpredictable consequences. We test our approach in visually rich 3D environments in ViZDoom and DMLab. In ViZDoom, our agent learns to successfully navigate to a distant goal at least 2 times faster than the state-of-the-art curiosity method ICM. In DMLab, our agent generalizes well to new procedurally generated levels of the game - reaching the goal at least 2 times more frequently than ICM on test mazes with very sparse reward.
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