Blog
The latest news from Google AI
Soft Actor-Critic: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics
Friday, January 18, 2019
Posted by Tuomas Haarnoja, Student Researcher and Sergey Levine, Faculty Advisor, Robotics at Google
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) provides the promise of fully automated learning of robotic behaviors directly from experience and interaction in the real world, due to its ability to process complex sensory input using general-purpose neural network representations. However, many existing RL algorithms require days or weeks (or more) worth of real-world data in order to converge to the desired behavior. Furthermore, such systems can be tough to deploy on complex robotic systems (such as legged robots) which can easily get damaged during the exploration phase, hyperparameter settings can be challenging to tune, and various safety considerations can introduce further limitations.
In collaboration with UC Berkeley,
we recently released Soft Actor-Critic
(SAC), a stable and efficient deep RL algorithm suitable for real-world robotic skill learning that is well-aligned with the requirements of robotic experimentation. Importantly, SAC is efficient enough to solve real-world robot tasks in only a handful of hours, and works on a variety of environments with a single set of hyperparameters. Below, we discuss some of the research behind SAC, and also describe some of our recent experiments.
Requirements for Real-World Robotic Learning
Real-world robotic experimentation brings significant challenges, such as constant interruptions in the data stream due to hardware failures and manual resets, and smooth exploration to avoid mechanical wear and tear on the robot, which set additional restrictions to both the algorithm and its implementation, including (but not limited to):
Good sample efficiency to lower the learning time
Minimal number of hyperparameters that require tuning
Reusing already collected data on different scenarios (known as off-policy learning)
Ensuring that learning and exploration does not damage the hardware
Soft Actor-Critic
Soft actor-critic is based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning, a framework that aims to both maximize the expected reward (which is the standard RL objective) and to maximize the policy's
entropy
. Policies with higher entropy are more random, which intuitively means that maximum entropy reinforcement learning prefers the most random policy that still achieves a high reward.
Why might this be desirable for robotic learning? The most obvious reason is that policies optimized for maximum entropy will be more robust: if the policy can tolerate highly random behavior during training, it is more likely to respond successfully to unexpected perturbations at test time. However, a more subtle reason is that training for maximum entropy can improve both the algorithm's robustness to hyperparameters and its sample efficiency (to learn more, see this
BAIR blog post
, and this
tutorial
).
Soft actor-critic maximizes the entropy augmented reward by learning a stochastic policy that maps states to actions and a
Q-function
that estimates the objective value of the current policy, optimizing them using approximate dynamic programming. In doing so, SAC views the objective as a grounded way to derive better reinforcement learning algorithms that perform consistently and are sample efficient enough to be applicable to real-world robotic applications. For technical details please see our
technical report
.
Performance of SAC
We evaluated SAC with two tasks: 1) quadrupedal walking with the Minitaur robot from
Ghost Robotics
, and 2) rotating a valve with a three finger
Dynamixel Claw
. Learning to walk presents a substantial challenge, as the robot is underactuated, and must therefore delicately balance contact forces on the legs to make forward progress. An untrained policy can lose balance and fall, and too many falls will eventually damage the robot, making sample-efficient learning essential.
Although we trained our policy only on flat terrain, we subsequently tested it on varied terrains and obstacles. In principle, policies learned with soft actor-critic should be robust to test-time perturbations, because they are trained to maximize entropy (i.e., inject maximal noise) at training-time. Indeed, we observe that the policies learned with our method are robust to these perturbations without any additional learning.
Illustration of learned walking, using SAC implemented on the Minitaur robot. A full video of the learning process can be found at our
project website
.
The manipulation task requires the hand to rotate a valve-like object so that the colored peg faces to the right, as shown below. This task is exceptionally challenging due to both the perception challenges and the need to control a hand with 9 degrees of freedom. In order to perceive the valve, the robot must use raw RGB images shown in the inset at the bottom right. The initial position of the valve is reset uniformly at random for each episode, forcing the policy to learn to use the raw RGB images to perceive the current valve orientation.
Soft actor-critic solves both of these tasks quickly: the Minitaur locomotion takes 2 hours, and the valve-turning task from image observations takes 20 hours. We also learned a policy for the valve-turning task without images by providing the actual valve position as an observation to the policy. Soft actor-critic can learn this easier version of the valve task in 3 hours. For comparison,
prior work
has used natural policy gradients to learn the same task without images in 7.4 hours.
Conclusion
Our work demonstrates that deep reinforcement learning based on maximum entropy framework can be applied to learn robot skills in challenging real-world settings. Since the policies are learned directly in the real world, they exhibit robustness to variations in the environment, which can be difficult to obtain otherwise. We also showed that we can learn directly from high-dimensional image observations, which represents a significant challenge in classical robotics. We hope that the release of SAC helps other research teams in their effort to adopt deep RL for more complex real-world tasks in the future.
For more technical details, please visit the
BAIR blog post
, or read an
early preprint of the locomotion experiment
and a
more complete description of the algorithm
. You can find the implementation on
GitHub
.
Acknowledgements
This research was done in collaboration between Google and UC Berkeley. We would like to thank all the people who were involved, including Sehoon Ha, Kristian Hartikainen, Jie Tan, George Tucker, Vincent Vanhoucke and Aurick Zhou.
Labels
2018
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2019
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
