Unsupervised Skill-Discovery and Skill-Learning in Minecraft

Juan José Nieto, Roger Creus Castanyer, Xavier Giro-i-Nieto

Keywords: reinforcement learning, self-supervised learning, unsupervised reinforcement learning, skill-discovery, skill-learning, intrinsic motivation, empowerment, minecraft

Abstract: Pre-training Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in a task-agnostic manner has shown promising results. However, previous works still struggle in learning and discovering meaningful skills in high-dimensional state-spaces. We approach the problem by leveraging unsupervised skill discovery and self-supervised learning of state representations. In our work, we learn a compact latent representation by making use of variational and contrastive techniques. We demonstrate that both enable RL agents to learn a set of basic navigation skills by maximizing an information theoretic objective. We assess our method in Minecraft 3D maps with different complexities. Our results show that representations and conditioned policies learned from pixels are enough for toy examples, but do not scale to realistic and complex maps. To overcome these limitations, we explore alternative input observations such as the relative position of the agent along with the raw pixels.