Title
The Body is Not a Given: Joint Agent Policy Learning and Morphology Evolution.
Abstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a powerful paradigm for deriving complex behaviors from simple reward signals in a wide range of environments. When applying RL to continuous control agents in simulated physics environments, the body is usually considered to be part of the environment. However, during evolution the physical body of biological organisms and their controlling brains are co -evolved, thus exploring a much larger space of actuator/controller configurations. Put differently, the intelligence does not reside only in the agent's mind, but also in the design of their body. We propose a method for uncovering strong agents, consisting of a good combination of a body and policy, based on combining RL with an evolutionary procedure. Given the resulting agent, we also propose an approach for identifying the body changes that contributed the most to the agent performance. We use the Shapley value from cooperative game theory to find the fair contribution of individual components, taking into account synergies between components. We evaluate our methods in an environment similar to the the recently proposed Robo-Sumo task, where agents in a software physics simulator compete in tipping over their opponent or pushing them out of the arena. Our results show that the proposed methods are indeed capable of generating strong agents, significantly outperforming baselines that focus on optimizing the agent policy alone. A video is available at: https://youtu.be/CH1ecRim9PI
Year
DOI
Keywords
2019
10.5555/3306127.3331813
Reinforcement Learning,Evolutionary Computation
Field
DocType
Citations 
Control theory,Computer science,Policy learning,Shapley value,Evolutionary computation,Physical body,Cooperative game theory,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Actuator,Reinforcement learning
Conference
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dylan Banarse110.34
Yoram Bachrach2126279.07
Siqi Liu3554.94
Guy Lever420.68
Nicolas Heess5176294.77
Chrisantha Fernando631424.46
Pushmeet Kohli77398332.84
Graepel, Thore854.10