Self-Supervised Policy Adaptation during Deployment

In most real world scenarios, a policy trained by reinforcement learning in one environment needs to be deployed in another, potentially quite different environment. However, generalization across different environments is known to be hard. A natural solution would be to keep training after deployment in the new environment, but this cannot be done if the new environment offers no reward signal. Our work explores the use of self-supervision to allow the policy to continue training after deployment without using any rewards. While previous methods explicitly anticipate changes in the new environment, we assume no prior knowledge of those changes yet still obtain significant improvements. Empirical evaluations are performed on diverse environments from DeepMind Control suite and ViZDoom. Our method improves generalization in 25 out of 30 environments across various tasks, and outperforms domain randomization on a majority of environments.