Composing Task Knowledge With Modular Successor Feature Approximators

Wilka Torrico Carvalho, Angelos Filos, Richard Lewis, Honglak Lee, Satinder Singh

Keywords: deep reinforcement learning, successor features, generalization, compositional generalization

TL;DR: A modular neural network for discovering, composing, and transferring predictive knowledge and behavior via Successor Features & Generalized Policy Improvement.

Abstract: Recently, the Successor Features and Generalized Policy Improvement (SF&GPI) framework has been proposed as a method for learning, composing and transferring predictive knowledge and behavior. SF&GPI works by having an agent learn predictive representations (SFs) that can be combined for transfer to new tasks with GPI. However, to be effective this approach requires state features that are useful to predict, and these state-features are typically hand-designed. In this work, we present a novel neural network architecture, “Modular Successor Feature Approximators” (MSFA), where modules both discover what is useful to predict, and learn their own predictive representations. We show that MSFA is able to better generalize compared to baseline architectures for learning SFs and a modular network that discovers factored state representations.

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Please Choose The Closest Area That Your Submission Falls Into: Reinforcement Learning (eg, decision and control, planning, hierarchical RL, robotics)

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