Hindsight States: Blending Sim and Real Task Elements for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in solving complex tasks when large amounts of data can be generated with little effort. In robotics, one approach to generate training data builds on simulations based on dynamics models derived from first principles. However, for tasks that, for instance, involve complex soft robots, devising such models is substantially more challenging. Being able to train effectively in increasingly complicated scenarios with reinforcement learning enables to take advantage of complex systems such as soft robots. Here, we leverage the imbalance in complexity of the dynamics to learn more sample-efficiently. We (i) abstract the task into distinct components, (ii) off-load the simple dynamics parts into the simulation, and (iii) multiply these virtual parts to generate more data in hindsight. Our new method, Hindsight States (HiS), uses this data and selects the most useful transitions for training. It can be used with an arbitrary off-policy algorithm. We validate our method on several challenging simulated tasks and demonstrate that it improves learning both alone and when combined with an existing hindsight algorithm, Hindsight Experience Replay (HER). Finally, we evaluate HiS on a physical system and show that it boosts performance on a complex table tennis task with a muscular robot. Videos and code of the experiments can be found on webdav.tuebingen.mpg.de/his/.