A Method for Animating Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure
Harrison Jesse Smith, Qingyuan Zheng, Yifei Li, Somya Jain, Jessica K. Hodgins
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
Poor sample efficiency continues to be the primary challenge for deployment of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for real-world applications, and in particular for visuo-motor control. Model-based RL has the potential to be highly sample efficient by concurrently learning a world model and using synthetic rollouts for planning and policy improvement. However, in practice, sample-efficient learning with model-based RL is bottlenecked by the exploration challenge. In this work, we find that leveraging just a handful of demonstrations can dramatically improve the sample-efficiency of model-based RL. Simply appending demonstrations to the interaction dataset, however, does not suffice. We identify key ingredients for leveraging demonstrations in model learning – policy pretraining, targeted exploration, and oversampling of demonstration data – which forms the three phases of our model-based RL framework. We empirically study three complex visuo-motor control domains and find that our method is 160% − 250% more successful in completing sparse reward tasks compared to prior approaches in the low data regime (100k interaction steps, 5 demonstrations). Code and videos are available at https://nicklashansen.github.io/modemrl.
Harrison Jesse Smith, Qingyuan Zheng, Yifei Li, Somya Jain, Jessica K. Hodgins
Yunbo Zhang, Deepak Gopinath, Yuting Ye, Jessica Hodgins, Greg Turk, Jungdam Won
Simran Arora, Patrick Lewis, Angela Fan, Jacob Kahn, Christopher Ré