Embodied Vision Conference Paper 2021

Explore the Context: Optimal Data Collection for Context-Conditional Dynamics Models

In this paper, we learn dynamics models for parametrized families of dynamical systems with varying properties. The dynamics models are formulated as stochastic processes conditioned on a latent context variable which is inferred from observed transitions of the respective system. The probabilistic formulation allows us to compute an action sequence which, for a limited number of environment interactions, optimally explores the given system within the parametrized family. This is achieved by steering the system through transitions being most informative for the context variable. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for exploration on a non-linear toy-problem and two well-known reinforcement learning environments.

Author(s): Jan Achterhold and Joerg Stueckler
Book Title: Proceedings of The 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2021)
Volume: 130
Year: 2021
Month: April
Day: 13-15
Publisher: JMLR
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Address: Cambridge, MA
Event Name: Titel The 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2021)
Event Place: Virtual Event
State: Published
URL: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v130/achterhold21a.html
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
ISSN: 2640-3498
Note: preprint CoRR abs/2102.11394
Links:
Attachments:

BibTex

@inproceedings{achterhold2021explorethecontext,
  title = {Explore the Context: Optimal Data Collection for Context-Conditional Dynamics Models},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of The 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2021) },
  abstract = {In this paper, we learn dynamics models for parametrized families of dynamical systems with varying properties. The dynamics models are formulated as stochastic processes conditioned on a latent context variable which is inferred from observed transitions of the respective system. The probabilistic formulation allows us to compute an action sequence which, for a limited number of environment interactions, optimally explores the given system within the parametrized family. This is achieved by steering the system through transitions being most informative for the context variable. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for exploration on a non-linear toy-problem and two well-known reinforcement learning environments. },
  volume = {130},
  publisher = {JMLR},
  address = {Cambridge, MA},
  month = apr,
  year = {2021},
  note = {preprint CoRR abs/2102.11394},
  slug = {achterhold2021explorethecontext},
  author = {Achterhold, Jan and Stueckler, Joerg},
  url = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v130/achterhold21a.html},
  month_numeric = {4}
}