Diverse Projection Ensembles for Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zanger, Moritz A., Böhmer, Wendelin, Spaan, Matthijs T. J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Zanger, Moritz A.
Böhmer, Wendelin
Spaan, Matthijs T. J.
author_facet Zanger, Moritz A.
Böhmer, Wendelin
Spaan, Matthijs T. J.
contents In contrast to classical reinforcement learning (RL), distributional RL algorithms aim to learn the distribution of returns rather than their expected value. Since the nature of the return distribution is generally unknown a priori or arbitrarily complex, a common approach finds approximations within a set of representable, parametric distributions. Typically, this involves a projection of the unconstrained distribution onto the set of simplified distributions. We argue that this projection step entails a strong inductive bias when coupled with neural networks and gradient descent, thereby profoundly impacting the generalization behavior of learned models. In order to facilitate reliable uncertainty estimation through diversity, we study the combination of several different projections and representations in a distributional ensemble. We establish theoretical properties of such projection ensembles and derive an algorithm that uses ensemble disagreement, measured by the average 1-Wasserstein distance, as a bonus for deep exploration. We evaluate our algorithm on the behavior suite benchmark and VizDoom and find that diverse projection ensembles lead to significant performance improvements over existing methods on a variety of tasks with the most pronounced gains in directed exploration problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_07124
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diverse Projection Ensembles for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Zanger, Moritz A.
Böhmer, Wendelin
Spaan, Matthijs T. J.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
In contrast to classical reinforcement learning (RL), distributional RL algorithms aim to learn the distribution of returns rather than their expected value. Since the nature of the return distribution is generally unknown a priori or arbitrarily complex, a common approach finds approximations within a set of representable, parametric distributions. Typically, this involves a projection of the unconstrained distribution onto the set of simplified distributions. We argue that this projection step entails a strong inductive bias when coupled with neural networks and gradient descent, thereby profoundly impacting the generalization behavior of learned models. In order to facilitate reliable uncertainty estimation through diversity, we study the combination of several different projections and representations in a distributional ensemble. We establish theoretical properties of such projection ensembles and derive an algorithm that uses ensemble disagreement, measured by the average 1-Wasserstein distance, as a bonus for deep exploration. We evaluate our algorithm on the behavior suite benchmark and VizDoom and find that diverse projection ensembles lead to significant performance improvements over existing methods on a variety of tasks with the most pronounced gains in directed exploration problems.
title Diverse Projection Ensembles for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07124