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Unsupervised Skill Discovery (USD) allows agents to autonomously learn diverse behaviors without task-specific rewards. While recent USD methods have shown promise, their application to real-world robotics remains underexplored. In this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Rafael Cathomen , Mayank Mittal , Marin Vlastelica , Marco Hutter

Unsupervised skill learning objectives (Gregor et al., 2016, Eysenbach et al., 2018) allow agents to learn rich repertoires of behavior in the absence of extrinsic rewards. They work by simultaneously training a policy to produce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-13 DJ Strouse , Kate Baumli , David Warde-Farley , Vlad Mnih , Steven Hansen

Acquiring abilities in the absence of a task-oriented reward function is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. This problem has been studied through the lens of empowerment, which draws a connection between option discovery…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Víctor Campos , Alexander Trott , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher , Xavier Giro-i-Nieto , Jordi Torres

Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for learning robotic skills while minimizing engineering effort. However, most reinforcement learning algorithms assume that a well-designed reward function is provided, and learn a single…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Archit Sharma , Michael Ahn , Sergey Levine , Vikash Kumar , Karol Hausman , Shixiang Gu

Current reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics often experiences difficulty in generalizing to new downstream tasks due to the innate task-specific training paradigm. To alleviate it, unsupervised RL, a framework that pre-trains the agent…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Daesol Cho , Jigang Kim , H. Jin Kim

Unsupervised skill discovery aims to acquire behavior primitives that improve exploration and accelerate downstream task learning. However, existing approaches often ignore the geometric symmetries of physical environments, leading to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Junwoo Chang , Joseph Park , Roberto Horowitz , Jongmin Lee , Jongeun Choi

Unsupervised reinforcement learning aims to train agents to learn a handful of policies or skills in environments without external reward. These pre-trained policies can accelerate learning when endowed with external reward, and can also be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-18 Shuncheng He , Yuhang Jiang , Hongchang Zhang , Jianzhun Shao , Xiangyang Ji

One of the key capabilities of intelligent agents is the ability to discover useful skills without external supervision. However, the current unsupervised skill discovery methods are often limited to acquiring simple, easy-to-learn skills…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Seohong Park , Kimin Lee , Youngwoon Lee , Pieter Abbeel

It is common to implicitly assume access to intelligently captured inputs (e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good observations is itself a major challenge. We address the problem of learning to look around:…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-12-22 Dinesh Jayaraman , Kristen Grauman

Pre-training Reinforcement Learning agents in a task-agnostic manner has shown promising results. However, previous works still struggle in learning and discovering meaningful skills in high-dimensional state-spaces, such as pixel-spaces.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Juan José Nieto , Roger Creus , Xavier Giro-i-Nieto

This paper deals with the problem of learning a skill-conditioned policy that acts meaningfully in the absence of a reward signal. Mutual information based objectives have shown some success in learning skills that reach a diverse set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Ishan Durugkar , Steven Hansen , Stephen Spencer , Volodymyr Mnih

Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Octavio Pappalardo

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Deepak Pathak , Dhiraj Gandhi , Abhinav Gupta

In complex real-world tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, collecting expert demonstrations is often more straightforward than specifying precise learning objectives and task descriptions. Learning from expert data can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Daulet Baimukashev , Gokhan Alcan , Kevin Sebastian Luck , Ville Kyrki

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Recently, methods for learning diverse skills to generate various behaviors without external rewards have been actively studied as a form of unsupervised reinforcement learning. However, most of the existing methods learn a finite number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Takahisa Imagawa , Takuya Hiraoka , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

Reinforcement learning requires manual specification of a reward function to learn a task. While in principle this reward function only needs to specify the task goal, in practice reinforcement learning can be very time-consuming or even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Kristian Hartikainen , Xinyang Geng , Tuomas Haarnoja , Sergey Levine

In this paper, we propose a novel approach called DIffusion-guided DIversity (DIDI) for offline behavioral generation. The goal of DIDI is to learn a diverse set of skills from a mixture of label-free offline data. We achieve this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Jinxin Liu , Xinghong Guo , Zifeng Zhuang , Donglin Wang

Autonomous agents that must exhibit flexible and broad capabilities will need to be equipped with large repertoires of skills. Defining each skill with a manually-designed reward function limits this repertoire and imposes a manual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Vitchyr H. Pong , Murtaza Dalal , Steven Lin , Ashvin Nair , Shikhar Bahl , Sergey Levine