Relevance-guided unsupervised discovery of abilities with quality-diversity algorithms
File(s)2204.09828.pdf (2.25 MB)
Accepted version
OA Location
Author(s)
Grillotti, Luca
Cully, Antoine
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Quality-Diversity algorithms provide efficient mechanisms to generate large collections of diverse and high-performing solutions, which have shown to be instrumental for solving downstream tasks. However, most of those algorithms rely on a behavioural descriptor to characterise the diversity that is hand-coded, hence requiring prior knowledge about the considered tasks. In this work, we introduce Relevance-guided Unsupervised Discovery of Abilities; a Quality-Diversity algorithm that autonomously finds a behavioural characterisation tailored to the task at hand. In particular, our method introduces a custom diversity metric that leads to higher densities of solutions near the areas of interest in the learnt behavioural descriptor space. We evaluate our approach on a simulated robotic environment, where the robot has to autonomously discover its abilities based on its full sensory data. We evaluated the algorithms on three tasks: navigation to random targets, moving forward with a high velocity, and performing half-rolls. The experimental results show that our method manages to discover collections of solutions that are not only diverse, but also well-adapted to the considered downstream task.
Date Issued
2022-07-01
Date Acceptance
2022-03-24
Citation
GECCO '22: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, 2022, pp.77-85
ISBN
9781450392372
Publisher
ACM
Start Page
77
End Page
85
Journal / Book Title
GECCO '22: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
Copyright Statement
© 2022 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in GECCO '22: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (July 2022) DOI: 10.1145/3512290.3528837
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Grant Number
EP/V006673/1
Source
Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2022-07-09
Finish Date
2022-07-14
Coverage Spatial
Boston, MA, USA