English

Learning Robust Controllers Via Probabilistic Model-Based Policy Search

Machine Learning 2021-10-27 v1

Abstract

Model-based Reinforcement Learning estimates the true environment through a world model in order to approximate the optimal policy. This family of algorithms usually benefits from better sample efficiency than their model-free counterparts. We investigate whether controllers learned in such a way are robust and able to generalize under small perturbations of the environment. Our work is inspired by the PILCO algorithm, a method for probabilistic policy search. We show that enforcing a lower bound to the likelihood noise in the Gaussian Process dynamics model regularizes the policy updates and yields more robust controllers. We demonstrate the empirical benefits of our method in a simulation benchmark.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.13576,
  title  = {Learning Robust Controllers Via Probabilistic Model-Based Policy Search},
  author = {Valentin Charvet and Bjørn Sand Jensen and Roderick Murray-Smith},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.13576},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted at RobustML Workshop - ICLR 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:11:39.310Z