Abstract: Approaches are described for training an action selection neural network system for use in controlling an agent interacting with an environment to perform a task, using a contrastive loss function based on a policy similarity metric. In one aspect, a method includes: obtaining a first observation of a first training environment; obtaining a plurality of second observations of a second training environment; for each second observation, determining a respective policy similarity metric between the second observation and the first observation; processing the first observation and the second observations using the representation neural network to generate a first representation of the first training observation and a respective second representation of each second training observation; and training the representation neural network on a contrastive loss function computed using the policy similarity metrics and the first and second representations.

Abstract: The technology relates to navigating aerial vehicles using deep reinforcement learning techniques to generate flight policies. A computing system may include a simulator configured to produce simulations of a flight of the aerial vehicle in a region of an atmosphere, a replay buffer configured to store frames of the simulations, and a learning module having a deep reinforcement learning architecture configured to, by a reinforcement learning algorithm, process an input of a set of frames, and output a neural network encoding a learned flight policy. A meta-learning system may include stacks of learning systems, a coordinator configured to provide an instruction to the learning systems that includes a parameter and a start time, and an evaluation server configured to evaluate resulting rewards from learned flight policies generated by the learning systems.