Language Guided Skill Discovery

Skill discovery methods enable agents to learn diverse emergent behaviors without explicit rewards. To make learned skills useful for downstream tasks, obtaining a semantically diverse repertoire of skills is crucial. While some approaches use discriminators to acquire distinguishable skills and others focus on increasing state coverage, the direct pursuit of ‘semantic diversity’ in skills remains underexplored. We hypothesize that leveraging the semantic knowledge of large language models (LLM) can lead us to improve semantic diversity of resulting behaviors. In this sense, we introduce Language Guided Skill Discovery (LGSD), a skill discovery framework that aims to directly maximize the semantic diversity between skills. LGSD takes user prompts as input and outputs a set of semantically distinctive skills. The prompts serve as a means to constrain the search space into a semantically desired subspace, and the generated LLM outputs guide the agent to visit semantically diverse states within the subspace. We demonstrate that LGSD enables legged robots to visit different user-intended areas on a plane by simply changing the prompt. Furthermore, we show that language guidance aids in discovering more diverse skills compared to five existing skill discovery methods in robot-arm manipulation environments. Lastly, LGSD provides a simple way of utilizing learned skills via natural language.