Adaptive Intrinsic Motivation with Decision Awareness

Suyoung Lee, Sae-Young Chung

Keywords: Reinforcement learning, Exploration, Intrinsic motivation

TL;DR: We propose an intrinsic reward coefficient adaptation scheme equipped with decision awareness.

Abstract: Intrinsic motivation is a simple but powerful method to encourage exploration, which is one of the fundamental challenges of reinforcement learning. However, we demonstrate that widely used intrinsic motivation methods are highly dependent on the ratio between the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards through extensive experiments on sparse reward MiniGrid tasks. To overcome the problem, we propose an intrinsic reward coefficient adaptation scheme that is equipped with intrinsic motivation awareness and adjusts the intrinsic reward coefficient online to maximize the extrinsic return. We demonstrate that our method, named Adaptive Intrinsic Motivation with Decision Awareness (AIMDA), operates stably in various challenging MiniGrid environments without algorithm-task-specific hyperparameter tuning.