TGRL: An Algorithm for Teacher Guided Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shenfeld, Idan, Hong, Zhang-Wei, Tamar, Aviv, Agrawal, Pulkit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Shenfeld, Idan
Hong, Zhang-Wei
Tamar, Aviv
Agrawal, Pulkit
author_facet Shenfeld, Idan
Hong, Zhang-Wei
Tamar, Aviv
Agrawal, Pulkit
contents Learning from rewards (i.e., reinforcement learning or RL) and learning to imitate a teacher (i.e., teacher-student learning) are two established approaches for solving sequential decision-making problems. To combine the benefits of these different forms of learning, it is common to train a policy to maximize a combination of reinforcement and teacher-student learning objectives. However, without a principled method to balance these objectives, prior work used heuristics and problem-specific hyperparameter searches to balance the two objectives. We present a $\textit{principled}$ approach, along with an approximate implementation for $\textit{dynamically}$ and $\textit{automatically}$ balancing when to follow the teacher and when to use rewards. The main idea is to adjust the importance of teacher supervision by comparing the agent's performance to the counterfactual scenario of the agent learning without teacher supervision and only from rewards. If using teacher supervision improves performance, the importance of teacher supervision is increased and otherwise it is decreased. Our method, $\textit{Teacher Guided Reinforcement Learning}$ (TGRL), outperforms strong baselines across diverse domains without hyper-parameter tuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_03186
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TGRL: An Algorithm for Teacher Guided Reinforcement Learning
Shenfeld, Idan
Hong, Zhang-Wei
Tamar, Aviv
Agrawal, Pulkit
Machine Learning
Learning from rewards (i.e., reinforcement learning or RL) and learning to imitate a teacher (i.e., teacher-student learning) are two established approaches for solving sequential decision-making problems. To combine the benefits of these different forms of learning, it is common to train a policy to maximize a combination of reinforcement and teacher-student learning objectives. However, without a principled method to balance these objectives, prior work used heuristics and problem-specific hyperparameter searches to balance the two objectives. We present a $\textit{principled}$ approach, along with an approximate implementation for $\textit{dynamically}$ and $\textit{automatically}$ balancing when to follow the teacher and when to use rewards. The main idea is to adjust the importance of teacher supervision by comparing the agent's performance to the counterfactual scenario of the agent learning without teacher supervision and only from rewards. If using teacher supervision improves performance, the importance of teacher supervision is increased and otherwise it is decreased. Our method, $\textit{Teacher Guided Reinforcement Learning}$ (TGRL), outperforms strong baselines across diverse domains without hyper-parameter tuning.
title TGRL: An Algorithm for Teacher Guided Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03186