Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Constraining Conditional Value-at-Risk

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ying, Chengyang, Zhou, Xinning, Su, Hang, Yan, Dong, Chen, Ning, Zhu, Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Ying, Chengyang
Zhou, Xinning
Su, Hang
Yan, Dong
Chen, Ning
Zhu, Jun
author_facet Ying, Chengyang
Zhou, Xinning
Su, Hang
Yan, Dong
Chen, Ning
Zhu, Jun
contents Though deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has obtained substantial success, it may encounter catastrophic failures due to the intrinsic uncertainty of both transition and observation. Most of the existing methods for safe reinforcement learning can only handle transition disturbance or observation disturbance since these two kinds of disturbance affect different parts of the agent; besides, the popular worst-case return may lead to overly pessimistic policies. To address these issues, we first theoretically prove that the performance degradation under transition disturbance and observation disturbance depends on a novel metric of Value Function Range (VFR), which corresponds to the gap in the value function between the best state and the worst state. Based on the analysis, we adopt conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) as an assessment of risk and propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm of CVaR-Proximal-Policy-Optimization (CPPO) which formalizes the risk-sensitive constrained optimization problem by keeping its CVaR under a given threshold. Experimental results show that CPPO achieves a higher cumulative reward and is more robust against both observation and transition disturbances on a series of continuous control tasks in MuJoCo.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2206_04436
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Constraining Conditional Value-at-Risk
Ying, Chengyang
Zhou, Xinning
Su, Hang
Yan, Dong
Chen, Ning
Zhu, Jun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Though deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has obtained substantial success, it may encounter catastrophic failures due to the intrinsic uncertainty of both transition and observation. Most of the existing methods for safe reinforcement learning can only handle transition disturbance or observation disturbance since these two kinds of disturbance affect different parts of the agent; besides, the popular worst-case return may lead to overly pessimistic policies. To address these issues, we first theoretically prove that the performance degradation under transition disturbance and observation disturbance depends on a novel metric of Value Function Range (VFR), which corresponds to the gap in the value function between the best state and the worst state. Based on the analysis, we adopt conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) as an assessment of risk and propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm of CVaR-Proximal-Policy-Optimization (CPPO) which formalizes the risk-sensitive constrained optimization problem by keeping its CVaR under a given threshold. Experimental results show that CPPO achieves a higher cumulative reward and is more robust against both observation and transition disturbances on a series of continuous control tasks in MuJoCo.
title Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Constraining Conditional Value-at-Risk
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.04436