UC Berkeley

Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for training agents to acquire complex behaviors, but it assumes that an external reward is provided by the environment. In practice, this task supervision is often hand-crafted by a user, a process that is time-consuming to repeat for every possible task and that makes manual engineering a primary bottleneck for behavior acquisition. This thesis describes how agents can acquire and reuse goal-directed behaviors in a completely self-supervised manner. It discusses challenges that arise when scaling up these methods to complex environments: How can an agent set goals for itself when it does not even know the set of possible states to explore? How does an agent autonomously reward itself for reaching a goal? How can an agent reuse this goal-directed behavior to decompose a new task into easier goal-reaching tasks? This thesis presents methods that I have developed to address these problems and share results that apply the methods to image-based, robot environments.