Cross-domain Random Pre-training with Prototypes for Reinforcement Learning

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. Unsupervised cross-domain Reinforcement Learning (RL) pre-training shows great potential for challenging continuous visual control but poses a big challenge. In this paper, we propose Cross-domain Random Pre-Training with prototypes (CRPTpro), a novel, efficient, and effective self-supervised cross-domain RL pre-training framework. CRPTpro decouples data sampling from encoder pre-training, proposing decoupled random collection to easily and quickly generate a qualified cross-domain pre-training dataset. Moreover, a novel prototypical self-supervised algorithm is proposed to pre-train an effective visual encoder that is generic across different domains. Without finetuning, the cross-domain encoder can be implemented for challenging downstream tasks defined in different domains, either seen or unseen. Compared with recent advanced methods, CRPTpro achieves better performance on downstream policy learning without extra training on exploration agents for data collection, greatly reducing the burden of pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across eight challenging continuous visual-control domains, including balance control, robot locomotion, and manipulation. CRPTpro significantly outperforms the next best Proto-RL(C) on 11/12 cross-domain downstream tasks with only 54.5% wall-clock pre-training time, exhibiting state-of-the-art pre-training performance with greatly improved pre-training efficiency.