Meta-Reinforcement Learning via Language Instructions

Abstract

Although deep reinforcement learning has recently been very successful at learning complex behaviors, it requires a tremendous amount of data to learn a task. One of the fundamental reasons causing this limitation lies in the nature of the trial-and-error learning paradigm of reinforcement learning, where the agent communicates with the environment and pro-gresses in the learning only relying on the reward signal. This is implicit and rather insufficient to learn a task well. On the con-trary, humans are usually taught new skills via natural language instructions. Utilizing language instructions for robotic motion control to improve the adaptability is a recently emerged topic and challenging. In this paper, we present a meta-RL algorithm that addresses the challenge of learning skills with language instructions in multiple manipulation tasks. On the one hand, our algorithm utilizes the language instructions to shape its in-terpretation of the task, on the other hand, it still learns to solve task in a trial-and-error process. We evaluate our algorithm on the robotic manipulation benchmark (Meta-World) and it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of training and testing task success rates. Codes are available at https://tumi6robot.wixsite.com/million.