Dynamic Neighborhood Construction for Structured Large Discrete Action Spaces

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Akkerman, Fabian, Luy, Julius, van Heeswijk, Wouter, Schiffer, Maximilian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Akkerman, Fabian
Luy, Julius
van Heeswijk, Wouter
Schiffer, Maximilian
author_facet Akkerman, Fabian
Luy, Julius
van Heeswijk, Wouter
Schiffer, Maximilian
contents Large discrete action spaces (LDAS) remain a central challenge in reinforcement learning. Existing solution approaches can handle unstructured LDAS with up to a few million actions. However, many real-world applications in logistics, production, and transportation systems have combinatorial action spaces, whose size grows well beyond millions of actions, even on small instances. Fortunately, such action spaces exhibit structure, e.g., equally spaced discrete resource units. With this work, we focus on handling structured LDAS (SLDAS) with sizes that cannot be handled by current benchmarks: we propose Dynamic Neighborhood Construction (DNC), a novel exploitation paradigm for SLDAS. We present a scalable neighborhood exploration heuristic that utilizes this paradigm and efficiently explores the discrete neighborhood around the continuous proxy action in structured action spaces with up to $10^{73}$ actions. We demonstrate the performance of our method by benchmarking it against three state-of-the-art approaches designed for large discrete action spaces across two distinct environments. Our results show that DNC matches or outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while being computationally more efficient. Furthermore, our method scales to action spaces that so far remained computationally intractable for existing methodologies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_19891
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dynamic Neighborhood Construction for Structured Large Discrete Action Spaces
Akkerman, Fabian
Luy, Julius
van Heeswijk, Wouter
Schiffer, Maximilian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Large discrete action spaces (LDAS) remain a central challenge in reinforcement learning. Existing solution approaches can handle unstructured LDAS with up to a few million actions. However, many real-world applications in logistics, production, and transportation systems have combinatorial action spaces, whose size grows well beyond millions of actions, even on small instances. Fortunately, such action spaces exhibit structure, e.g., equally spaced discrete resource units. With this work, we focus on handling structured LDAS (SLDAS) with sizes that cannot be handled by current benchmarks: we propose Dynamic Neighborhood Construction (DNC), a novel exploitation paradigm for SLDAS. We present a scalable neighborhood exploration heuristic that utilizes this paradigm and efficiently explores the discrete neighborhood around the continuous proxy action in structured action spaces with up to $10^{73}$ actions. We demonstrate the performance of our method by benchmarking it against three state-of-the-art approaches designed for large discrete action spaces across two distinct environments. Our results show that DNC matches or outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while being computationally more efficient. Furthermore, our method scales to action spaces that so far remained computationally intractable for existing methodologies.
title Dynamic Neighborhood Construction for Structured Large Discrete Action Spaces
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19891