## $\mathrm{SO}(2)$-Equivariant Reinforcement Learning

29 Sept 2021, 00:32 (modified: 14 Mar 2022, 17:00)ICLR 2022 SpotlightReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Equivariance, Robotic Manipulation
Abstract: Equivariant neural networks enforce symmetry within the structure of their convolutional layers, resulting in a substantial improvement in sample efficiency when learning an equivariant or invariant function. Such models are applicable to robotic manipulation learning which can often be formulated as a rotationally symmetric problem. This paper studies equivariant model architectures in the context of $Q$-learning and actor-critic reinforcement learning. We identify equivariant and invariant characteristics of the optimal $Q$-function and the optimal policy and propose equivariant DQN and SAC algorithms that leverage this structure. We present experiments that demonstrate that our equivariant versions of DQN and SAC can be significantly more sample efficient than competing algorithms on an important class of robotic manipulation problems.
One-sentence Summary: This paper proposes equivariant DQN and equivariant SAC that significantly improve the sample efficiency of RL in robotic manipulation.
Supplementary Material: zip
13 Replies