ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper
Efficient Skill Discovery via Regret-Aware Optimization
- He Zhang 0030
- Ming Zhou
- Shaopeng Zhai
- Ying Sun 0006
- Hui Xiong 0001
Unsupervised skill discovery aims to learn diverse and distinguishable behaviors in open-ended reinforcement learning. For the existing methods, they focus on improving the diversity via pure exploration, mutual information optimization and learning temporal representation. Despite they perform well on exploration, they remain limited in terms of efficiency, especially for the high-dimensional situations. In this work, we frame the skill discovery as a min-max game of skill generation and policy learning, proposing a regret-aware method on top of temporal representation learning that expands the discovered skill space along the direction of upgradable policy strength. The key insight behind the proposed method is that the skill discovery is adversarial to the policy learning, i. e. , skills with weak strength should be further explored while less exploration for the skills with converged strength. As an implementation, we score the degree of strength convergence with regret, and guide the skill discovery with a learnable skill generator. To avoid degeneration, the skill generation comes from an upgradable population of skill generators. We conduct experiments on environments with varying complexities and dimension sizes. Empirical results show that our method outperforms baselines on both efficiency and diversity. Moreover, our method achieves 15% zero-shot improvement on high-dimensional environments, compared to existing methods.