One Policy to Control Them All: Shared Modular Policies for Agent-Agnostic Control

Wenlong Huang, Igor Mordatch, Deepak Pathak
Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 119:4455-4464, 2020.

Abstract

Reinforcement learning is typically concerned with learning control policies tailored to a particular agent. We investigate whether there exists a single global policy that can generalize to control a wide variety of agent morphologies – ones in which even dimensionality of state and action spaces changes. We propose to express this global policy as a collection of identical modular neural networks, dubbed as Shared Modular Policies (SMP), that correspond to each of the agent’s actuators. Every module is only responsible for controlling its corresponding actuator and receives information from only its local sensors. In addition, messages are passed between modules, propagating information between distant modules. We show that a single modular policy can successfully generate locomotion behaviors for several planar agents with different skeletal structures such as monopod hoppers, quadrupeds, bipeds, and generalize to variants not seen during training – a process that would normally require training and manual hyperparameter tuning for each morphology. We observe that a wide variety of drastically diverse locomotion styles across morphologies as well as centralized coordination emerges via message passing between decentralized modules purely from the reinforcement learning objective. Videos and code at https://huangwl18.github.io/modular-rl/

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v119-huang20d, title = {One Policy to Control Them All: Shared Modular Policies for Agent-Agnostic Control}, author = {Huang, Wenlong and Mordatch, Igor and Pathak, Deepak}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {4455--4464}, year = {2020}, editor = {III, Hal Daumé and Singh, Aarti}, volume = {119}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {13--18 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/huang20d/huang20d.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/huang20d.html}, abstract = {Reinforcement learning is typically concerned with learning control policies tailored to a particular agent. We investigate whether there exists a single global policy that can generalize to control a wide variety of agent morphologies – ones in which even dimensionality of state and action spaces changes. We propose to express this global policy as a collection of identical modular neural networks, dubbed as Shared Modular Policies (SMP), that correspond to each of the agent’s actuators. Every module is only responsible for controlling its corresponding actuator and receives information from only its local sensors. In addition, messages are passed between modules, propagating information between distant modules. We show that a single modular policy can successfully generate locomotion behaviors for several planar agents with different skeletal structures such as monopod hoppers, quadrupeds, bipeds, and generalize to variants not seen during training – a process that would normally require training and manual hyperparameter tuning for each morphology. We observe that a wide variety of drastically diverse locomotion styles across morphologies as well as centralized coordination emerges via message passing between decentralized modules purely from the reinforcement learning objective. Videos and code at https://huangwl18.github.io/modular-rl/} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T One Policy to Control Them All: Shared Modular Policies for Agent-Agnostic Control %A Wenlong Huang %A Igor Mordatch %A Deepak Pathak %B Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2020 %E Hal Daumé III %E Aarti Singh %F pmlr-v119-huang20d %I PMLR %P 4455--4464 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/huang20d.html %V 119 %X Reinforcement learning is typically concerned with learning control policies tailored to a particular agent. We investigate whether there exists a single global policy that can generalize to control a wide variety of agent morphologies – ones in which even dimensionality of state and action spaces changes. We propose to express this global policy as a collection of identical modular neural networks, dubbed as Shared Modular Policies (SMP), that correspond to each of the agent’s actuators. Every module is only responsible for controlling its corresponding actuator and receives information from only its local sensors. In addition, messages are passed between modules, propagating information between distant modules. We show that a single modular policy can successfully generate locomotion behaviors for several planar agents with different skeletal structures such as monopod hoppers, quadrupeds, bipeds, and generalize to variants not seen during training – a process that would normally require training and manual hyperparameter tuning for each morphology. We observe that a wide variety of drastically diverse locomotion styles across morphologies as well as centralized coordination emerges via message passing between decentralized modules purely from the reinforcement learning objective. Videos and code at https://huangwl18.github.io/modular-rl/
APA
Huang, W., Mordatch, I. & Pathak, D.. (2020). One Policy to Control Them All: Shared Modular Policies for Agent-Agnostic Control. Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 119:4455-4464 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/huang20d.html.

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