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Diversity is All You Need: Learning Skills without a Reward Function

15 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

15 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Intelligent creatures can explore their environments and learn useful skills without supervision. In this paper, we propose DIAYN ('Diversity is All You Need'), a method for learning useful skills without a reward function. Our proposed method learns skills by maximizing an information theoretic objective using a maximum entropy policy. On a variety of simulated robotic tasks, we show that this simple objective results in the unsupervised emergence of diverse skills, such as walking and jumping. In a number of reinforcement learning benchmark environments, our method is able to learn a skill that solves the benchmark task despite never receiving the true task reward. We show how pretrained skills can provide a good parameter initialization for downstream tasks, and can be composed hierarchically to solve complex, sparse reward tasks. Our results suggest that unsupervised discovery of skills can serve as an effective pretraining mechanism for overcoming challenges of exploration and data efficiency in reinforcement learning.

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representative citing papers

Intrinsically motivated collective motion

physics.bio-ph · 2019-07-18 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Future State Maximisation (FSM) leads to emergent collective motion features like cohesion and co-alignment in agent simulations.

Goal-Conditioned Agents that Learn Everything All at Once

cs.LG · 2026-05-22 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

LEO enables efficient all-goals learning in goal-conditioned RL by jointly predicting for all goals in one network pass, yielding >250x speedup over relabelling and better performance on Craftax.

Implicit Safety Alignment from Crowd Preferences

cs.AI · 2026-05-20 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

A hierarchical framework extracts implicit safety criteria from crowd preferences and composes them via high-level policy to reduce safety violations in downstream RL tasks without explicit safety rewards.

Delay-Empowered Causal Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

cs.LG · 2026-05-12 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

DECHRL models causal structures and stochastic delay distributions within hierarchical RL and incorporates them into a delay-aware empowerment objective to improve performance under temporal uncertainty.

Hierarchical Behaviour Spaces

cs.AI · 2026-04-27 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Hierarchical Behaviour Spaces uses linear combinations of reward functions to induce expressive behavior spaces in hierarchical RL, yielding strong performance on NetHack primarily through better exploration rather than long-term planning.

Neural Embedding for Physical Manipulations

cs.LG · 2019-07-13 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Generative model with normalized pairwise distance constraint discovers output space topologies from sparse data and outperforms GANs and VAEs by avoiding mode collapse.

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