On the Importance of Exploration for Generalization in Reinforcement
  Learning
Yiding Jiang J. Zico Kolter Roberta Raileanu
Existing approaches for improving generalization in deep reinforcement
learning (RL) have mostly focused on representation learning, neglecting
RL-specific aspects such as exploration. We hypothesize that the agent's
exploration strategy plays a key role in its ability to generalize to new
environments. Through a series of experiments in a tabular contextual MDP, we
show that exploration is helpful not only for efficiently finding the optimal
policy for the training environments but also for acquiring knowledge that
helps decision making in unseen environments. Based on these observations, we
propose EDE: Exploration via Distributional Ensemble, a method that encourages
exploration of states with high epistemic uncertainty through an ensemble of
Q-value distributions. Our algorithm is the first value-based approach to
achieve state-of-the-art on both Procgen and Crafter, two benchmarks for
generalization in RL with high-dimensional observations. The open-sourced
implementation can be found at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ede .