Measuring Empowerment from Offline Data for Intrinsically Motivated Exploration

Large, unlabeled datasets of prior experience have become increasingly available for agentic tasks in domains such as robotics and coding. A common recipe for these tasks is to train a policy using the prior data, and then further improve it with online rollouts. But while much work has studied how to use both the offline and online data for policy extraction, far less work has been done to understand how the prior data can be used to efficiently explore during the online learning phase. Previous work has attempted to formalize this idea by defining the empowerment, a measure of how many future states an agent can realize; states with higher empowerment require more exploration as there are more futures to explore. However, existing methods for estimating the empowerment require online policy rollouts in the environment. We propose the first method for estimating the empowerment from unlabeled prior data, without any environment interaction. By jointly learning an empowerment-maximizing policy together with its discounted state-occupancy, our estimator can be trained on unlabeled trajectories generated from any unknown policy. We demonstrate that our empowerment estimator qualitatively gives intuitive empowerment measures and show that the pretrained estimator can be used to improve exploration in the online goal-conditioned reinforcement learning setting.