We’re releasing CoinRun, a training environment which provides a metric for an agent’s ability to transfer its experience to novel situations and has already helped clarify a longstanding puzzle in reinforcement learning. CoinRun strikes a desirable balance in complexity: the environment is simpler than traditional platformer games like Sonic the Hedgehog but still poses a worthy generalization challenge for state of the art algorithms.
The first run of our Retro Contest—exploring the development of algorithms that can generalize from previous experience—is now complete.
We’ve trained an agent to achieve a high score of 74,500 on Montezuma’s Revenge from a single human demonstration, better than any previously published result. Our algorithm is simple: the agent plays a sequence of games starting from carefully chosen states from the demonstration, and learns from them by optimizing the game score using PPO, the same reinforcement learning algorithm that underpins OpenAI Five.
We’ve developed Random Network Distillation (RND), a prediction-based method for encouraging reinforcement learning agents to explore their environments through curiosity, which for the first time exceeds average human performance on Montezuma’s Revenge.
We’re releasing an experimental metalearning approach called Evolved Policy Gradients, a method that evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks. Agents trained with EPG can succeed at basic tasks at test time that were outside their training regime, like learning to navigate to an object on a different side of the room from where it was placed during training.
We’re open-sourcing OpenAI Baselines, our internal effort to reproduce reinforcement learning algorithms with performance on par with published results. We’ll release the algorithms over upcoming months; today’s release includes DQN and three of its variants.
arXiv:2606. 29980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot Transfer in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent that can generate optimal policies for any reward function, without additional learning at transfer time, while training only on reward-free trajectories.
By Louis Bagot (SyCoSMA), Mathieu Lefort (LIRIS, SyCoSMA, IRISA, MALT, UR), La\"etitia Matignon (SyCoSMA)
We’re releasing the public beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. It consists of a growing suite of environments (from simulated robots to Atari games), and a site for comparing and reproducing results.
arXiv:2606. 03017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward transfer in Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is unreliable when policies must generalize to unseen combinations of environment dynamics and task goals.
By Yikang Gui, Bikramjit Banerjee, Prashant Doshi
We’ve discovered that evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that’s been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e. g.
arXiv:2606. 00840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents a logic-driven framework to evaluate the performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in their ability to generalize to unseen tasks.
By Vignesh Subramanian, {\DJ}or{\dj}e \v{Z}ikeli\'c, Suguman Bansal
arXiv:2607. 07769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Starting from the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the state-action value function that led to winning one of the most challenging games, to algorithmic advancements that allowed solving problems without even explicitly stating the rules of the challenge at hand, reinforcement learning research has been the center of remarkable scientific progress for the past decade.
By Ezgi Korkmaz