Learning General World Models in a Handful of Reward-Free Deployments

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

Abstract

Building generally capable agents is a grand challenge for deep reinforcement learning (RL). To approach this challenge practically, we outline two key desiderata: 1) to facilitate generalization, exploration should be task agnostic; 2) to facilitate scalability, exploration policies should collect large quantities of data without costly centralized retraining. Combining these two properties, we introduce the reward-free deployment efficiency setting, a new paradigm for RL research. We then present CASCADE, a novel approach for self-supervised exploration in this new setting. CASCADE seeks to learn a world model by collecting data with a population of agents, using an information theoretic objective inspired by Bayesian Active Learning. CASCADE achieves this by specifically maximizing the diversity of trajectories sampled by the population through a novel cascading objective. We provide theoretical intuition for CASCADE which we show in a tabular setting improves upon naïve approaches that do not account for population diversity. We then demonstrate that CASCADE collects diverse task-agnostic datasets and learns agents that generalize zero-shot to novel, unseen downstream tasks on Atari, MiniGrid, Crafter and the DM Control Suite. Code and videos are available at https://yingchenxu.com/cascade/.

Latest Publications

A Practical Stereo Depth System for Smart Glasses

Jialiang Wang, Daniel Scharstein, Akash Bapat, Kevin Blackburn-Matzen Matthew Yu, Jonathan Lehman, Suhib Alsisan, Yanghan Wang, Sam Tsai, Jan-Michael Frahm, Zijian He, Peter Vajda, Michael Cohen, Matt Uyttendaele

CVPR - 2023

Presto: A Decade of SQL Analytics at Meta

Yutian James Sun, Tim Meehan, Rebecca Schlussel, Wenlei Xie, Masha Basmanova, Orri Erling, Andrii Rosa, Shixuan Fan, Rongrong Zhong, Arun Thirupathi, Nikhil Collooru, Ke Wang, Sameer Agarwal, Arjun Gupta, Dionysios Logothetis, Kostas Xirogiannopoulos, Bin Fan, Amit Dutta, Varun Gajjala, Rohit Jain, Ajay Palakuzhy, Prithvi Pandian, Sergey Pershin, Abhisek Saikia, Pranjal Shankhdhar, Neerad Somanchi, Swapnil Tailor, Jialiang Tan, Sreeni Viswanadha, Zac Wen, Deepak Majeti, Aditi Pandit, Biswapesh Chattopadhyay

SIGMOD - 2023