  Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very
sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a
random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic
motivation to guide the exploration via generative models, predictive forward
models, or discriminative modeling of novelty. We propose EMI, which is an
exploration method that constructs embedding representation of states and
actions that does not rely on generative decoding of the full observation but
extracts predictive signals that can be used to guide exploration based on
forward prediction in the representation space. Our experiments show
competitive results on challenging locomotion tasks with continuous control and
on image-based exploration tasks with discrete actions on Atari. The source
code is available at https://github.com/snu-mllab/EMI .
