Not Only Domain Randomization: Universal Policy with Embedding System Identification

Abstract: Domain randomization (DR) cannot provide optimal policies for adapting the learning agent to the dynamics of the environment, although it can generalize sub-optimal policies to work in a transferred domain. In this paper, we present Universal Policy with Embedding System Identification (UPESI) as an implicit system identification (SI) approach with universal policies (UPs), as a learning-based control method to execute optimal actions adaptively in environments with various dynamic properties. Previous approaches of SI for adaptive policies either conduct explicit SI, which is testified to be an ill-posed problem, or suffer from low efficiency without leveraging the simulation oracle. We propose to conduct SI in the embedding space of system dynamics by leveraging a learned forward dynamics model, and use Bayesian optimization for the SI process given transition data in a new environment. The identified embeddings are applied as additional input to the UP to enable its dynamics adaptability. Experiments demonstrate the advantageous performances of our proposed UP with embedding SI over standard DR and conventional SI approaches on both low-dimensional and high-dimensional simulation tasks.