Deep Exploration with PAC-Bayes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tasdighi, Bahareh, Haussmann, Manuel, Werge, Nicklas, Wu, Yi-Shan, Kandemir, Melih
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Tasdighi, Bahareh
Haussmann, Manuel
Werge, Nicklas
Wu, Yi-Shan
Kandemir, Melih
author_facet Tasdighi, Bahareh
Haussmann, Manuel
Werge, Nicklas
Wu, Yi-Shan
Kandemir, Melih
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control under delayed rewards is an under-explored problem despite its significance in real-world applications. Many complex skills are based on intermediate ones as prerequisites. For instance, a humanoid locomotor must learn how to stand before it can learn to walk. To cope with delayed reward, an agent must perform deep exploration. However, existing deep exploration methods are designed for small discrete action spaces, and their generalization to state-of-the-art continuous control remains unproven. We address the deep exploration problem for the first time from a PAC-Bayesian perspective in the context of actor-critic learning. To do this, we quantify the error of the Bellman operator through a PAC-Bayes bound, where a bootstrapped ensemble of critic networks represents the posterior distribution, and their targets serve as a data-informed function-space prior. We derive an objective function from this bound and use it to train the critic ensemble. Each critic trains an individual soft actor network, implemented as a shared trunk and critic-specific heads. The agent performs deep exploration by acting epsilon-softly on a randomly chosen actor head. Our proposed algorithm, named {\it PAC-Bayesian Actor-Critic (PBAC)}, is the only algorithm to consistently discover delayed rewards on continuous control tasks with varying difficulty.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03055
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Exploration with PAC-Bayes
Tasdighi, Bahareh
Haussmann, Manuel
Werge, Nicklas
Wu, Yi-Shan
Kandemir, Melih
Machine Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control under delayed rewards is an under-explored problem despite its significance in real-world applications. Many complex skills are based on intermediate ones as prerequisites. For instance, a humanoid locomotor must learn how to stand before it can learn to walk. To cope with delayed reward, an agent must perform deep exploration. However, existing deep exploration methods are designed for small discrete action spaces, and their generalization to state-of-the-art continuous control remains unproven. We address the deep exploration problem for the first time from a PAC-Bayesian perspective in the context of actor-critic learning. To do this, we quantify the error of the Bellman operator through a PAC-Bayes bound, where a bootstrapped ensemble of critic networks represents the posterior distribution, and their targets serve as a data-informed function-space prior. We derive an objective function from this bound and use it to train the critic ensemble. Each critic trains an individual soft actor network, implemented as a shared trunk and critic-specific heads. The agent performs deep exploration by acting epsilon-softly on a randomly chosen actor head. Our proposed algorithm, named {\it PAC-Bayesian Actor-Critic (PBAC)}, is the only algorithm to consistently discover delayed rewards on continuous control tasks with varying difficulty.
title Deep Exploration with PAC-Bayes
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03055