There has been an increasing interest in learning dynamics simulators for
model-based control. Compared with off-the-shelf physics engines, a learnable
simulator can quickly adapt to unseen objects, scenes, and tasks. However,
existing models like interaction networks only work for fully observable
systems; they also only consider pairwise interactions within a single time
step, both restricting their use in practical systems. We introduce Propagation
Networks (PropNet), a differentiable, learnable dynamics model that handles
partially observable scenarios and enables instantaneous propagation of signals
beyond pairwise interactions. Experiments show that our propagation networks
not only outperform current learnable physics engines in forward simulation,
but also achieve superior performance on various control tasks. Compared with
existing model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms, model-based control
with propagation networks is more accurate, efficient, and generalizable to
new, partially observable scenes and tasks.

本文介绍了 PropNet—— 一种可学习的动力学模型，能够在部分可观测场景下进行模型控制，并实现信号的即时传播。实验结果表明，与其他学习物理引擎相比，PropNet 的前向模拟性能更好，在各种控制任务中也表现出更高的性能。与现有的模型无深度强化学习算法相比，使用 Propagation Networks 实现模型控制更准确、有效，且更具普适性。