Learning Plannable Representations with Causal InfoGAN
Thanard Kurutach and Aviv Tamar and Ge Yang and Stuart Russell and Pieter Abbeel
arXiv e-Print archive - 2018 via Local arXiv
Keywords: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.NE, cs.RO, stat.ML
First published: 2018/07/24 (6 years ago)
Abstract: In recent years, deep generative models have been shown to 'imagine' convincing high-dimensional observations such as images, audio, and even video, learning directly from raw data. In this work, we ask how to imagine goal-directed visual plans -- a plausible sequence of observations that transition a dynamical system from its current configuration to a desired goal state, which can later be used as a reference trajectory for control. We focus on systems with high-dimensional observations, such as images, and propose an approach that naturally combines representation learning and planning. Our framework learns a generative model of sequential observations, where the generative process is induced by a transition in a low-dimensional planning model, and an additional noise. By maximizing the mutual information between the generated observations and the transition in the planning model, we obtain a low-dimensional representation that best explains the causal nature of the data. We structure the planning model to be compatible with efficient planning algorithms, and we propose several such models based on either discrete or continuous states. Finally, to generate a visual plan, we project the current and goal observations onto their respective states in the planning model, plan a trajectory, and then use the generative model to transform the trajectory to a sequence of observations. We demonstrate our method on imagining plausible visual plans of rope manipulation.
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Thanard Kurutach and Aviv Tamar and Ge Yang and Stuart Russell and Pieter Abbeel
arXiv e-Print archive - 2018 via Local arXiv
Keywords: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.NE, cs.RO, stat.ML
First published: 2018/07/24 (6 years ago)
Abstract: In recent years, deep generative models have been shown to 'imagine' convincing high-dimensional observations such as images, audio, and even video, learning directly from raw data. In this work, we ask how to imagine goal-directed visual plans -- a plausible sequence of observations that transition a dynamical system from its current configuration to a desired goal state, which can later be used as a reference trajectory for control. We focus on systems with high-dimensional observations, such as images, and propose an approach that naturally combines representation learning and planning. Our framework learns a generative model of sequential observations, where the generative process is induced by a transition in a low-dimensional planning model, and an additional noise. By maximizing the mutual information between the generated observations and the transition in the planning model, we obtain a low-dimensional representation that best explains the causal nature of the data. We structure the planning model to be compatible with efficient planning algorithms, and we propose several such models based on either discrete or continuous states. Finally, to generate a visual plan, we project the current and goal observations onto their respective states in the planning model, plan a trajectory, and then use the generative model to transform the trajectory to a sequence of observations. We demonstrate our method on imagining plausible visual plans of rope manipulation.
[link]
This paper tries to solve the problem of how to learn systems that, given a starting state and a desired target, can earn the set of actions necessary to reach that target. The strong version of this problem requires a planning algorithm to learn a full set of actions to take the agent from state A to B. However, this is a difficult and complex task, and so this paper tries to address a relaxed version of this task: generating a set of “waypoint” observations between A and B, such that each successive observation is relatively close to one another in terms of possible actions (the paper calls this ‘h-reachable’, if observations are reachable from one another in h timesteps). With these checkpoint observations in hand, the planning system can them solve many iterations of a much shorter-time-scale version of the problem. However, the paper asserts, applying pre-designed planning algorithms in observation space (sparse, high-dimensional) is difficult, because planning algorithms apparently do better with denser representations. (I don’t really understand, based on just reading this paper, *why* this is the case, other than the general fact that high dimensional, sparse data is just hard for most things). Historically, a typical workflow for applying planning algorithms to an environment would have been to hand-design feature representations where nearby representations were close in causal decision space (i.e. could be easily reached from one another). This paper’s goal is to derive such representations from data, rather than hand-designing them. The system they design to do this is a little unwieldy to follow, and I only have about 80% confidence that I fully understand all the mechanisms. One basic way you might compress high-dimensional space into a low-dimensional code is by training a Variational Autoencoder, and pulling the latent code out of the bottleneck in the middle. However, we also want to be able to map between our low-dimensional code and a realistic observation space, once we’re done planning and have our trajectory of codes, and VAE typically have difficulty generating high-dimensional observations with high fidelity. If what you want is image-generation fidelity, the natural step would be to use a GAN. However, GANs aren’t really natively designed to learn an informative representation; their main goal is generation, and there’s no real incentive for the noise variables used to seed generation to encode any useful information. One GAN design that tries to get around this is the InfoGAN, which gets its name from the requirement that there be high mutual information between (some subset of) the noise variables used to seed the generator, and the actual observation produced. I’m not going to get into the math of the variational approximation, but what this actually mechanically shakes out to is: in addition to generating an observation from a code, an InfoGAN also tries to predict the original code subset given the observation. Intuitively, this requirement, for the observation to contain information about the code, also means the code is forced to contain meaningful information about the image generated from it. However, even with this system, even if each code separately corresponds to a realistic observation, there’s no guarantee that closeness in state space corresponds to closeness in “causality space”. This feature is valuable for planning, because it means that if you chart out a trajectory through state space, it actually corresponds to a reasonable trajectory through observation space. In order to solve this problem, the authors added their final, and more novel, modification to the InfoGAN framework: instead of giving the GAN one latent code, and having it predict one observation, they would give two at a time, and have the GAN try to generate a pair of temporally nearby (i.e. less than h actions away) observations. Importantly, they’d also define some transition or sampling function within state space, so that there would be a structured or predictable way that adjacent pairs of states looked. So, if the GAN were able to learn to map adjacent points in state space to adjacent points in observation space, then you’d be able to plan out trajectories in state space, and have them be realistic in observation space. https://i.imgur.com/oVlVc0x.png They do some experiments and do show that both adding the “Info” structure of the InfoGAN, and adding the paired causal structure, lead to states with improved planning properties.They also compared the clusters derived from their Causal InfoGAN states to the clusters you’d get from just naively assuming that nearness in observation space meant nearness in causality space. https://i.imgur.com/ddQpIdH.png They specifically tested this on an environment divided into two “rooms”, where there were many places where there were two points, nearby in Euclidean space, but far away (or mutually inaccessible) in action space. They showed that the Causal InfoGAN (b) was successfully able to learn representations such that points nearby in action space clustered together, whereas a Euclidean representation (c) didn't have this property. 
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