Effective Diversity in Population-Based Reinforcement Learning

Maintaining a population of solutions has been shown to increase exploration in reinforcement learning, typically attributed to the greater diversity of behaviors considered. One such class of methods, novelty search, considers further boosting diversity across agents via a multi-objective optimization formulation. Despite the intuitive appeal, these mechanisms have several shortcomings. First, they make use of mean field updates, which induce cycling behaviors. Second, they often rely on handcrafted behavior characterizations, which require domain knowledge. Furthermore, boosting diversity often has a detrimental impact on optimizing already fruitful behaviors for rewards. Setting the relative importance of novelty- versus reward-factor is usually hardcoded or requires tedious tuning/annealing. In this paper, we introduce a novel measure of population-wide diversity, leveraging ideas from Determinantal Point Processes. We combine this in a principled fashion with the reward function to adapt to the degree of diversity during training, borrowing ideas from online learning. Combined with task-agnostic behavioral embeddings, we show this approach outperforms previous methods for multi-objective optimization, as well as vanilla algorithms solely optimizing for rewards.