SeRO: Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Recovery from
  Out-of-Distribution Situations
Chan Kim Jaekyung Cho Christophe Bobda Seung-Woo Seo Seong-Woo Kim
Robotic agents trained using reinforcement learning have the problem of
taking unreliable actions in an out-of-distribution (OOD) state. Agents can
easily become OOD in real-world environments because it is almost impossible
for them to visit and learn the entire state space during training.
Unfortunately, unreliable actions do not ensure that agents perform their
original tasks successfully. Therefore, agents should be able to recognize
whether they are in OOD states and learn how to return to the learned state
distribution rather than continue to take unreliable actions. In this study, we
propose a novel method for retraining agents to recover from OOD situations in
a self-supervised manner when they fall into OOD states. Our in-depth
experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves the
agent's ability to recover from OOD situations in terms of sample efficiency
and restoration of the performance for the original tasks. Moreover, we show
that our method can retrain the agent to recover from OOD situations even when
in-distribution states are difficult to visit through exploration.