Curriculum learning with Hindsight Experience Replay for sequential object manipulation tasks

Abstract

Learning complex tasks from scratch is challenging and often impossible for humans as well as for artificial agents. Instead, a curriculum can be used, which decomposes a complex task – the target task – into a sequence of source tasks. Each source task is a simplified version of the next source task with increasing complexity. Learning then occurs gradually by training on each source task while using knowledge from the curriculum’s prior source tasks. In this study, we present a new algorithm that combines curriculum learning with Hindsight Experience Replay (HER), to learn sequential object manipulation tasks for multiple goals and sparse feedback. The algorithm exploits the recurrent structure inherent in many object manipulation tasks and implements the entire learning process in the original simulation without adjusting it to each source task. We test our algorithm on three challenging throwing tasks in simulation and show significant improvements compared to vanilla-HER.