Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Xu, Ziping, Xu, Zifan, Jiang, Runxuan, Stone, Peter, Tewari, Ambuj
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01636
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911789961183232
author Xu, Ziping
Xu, Zifan
Jiang, Runxuan
Stone, Peter
Tewari, Ambuj
author_facet Xu, Ziping
Xu, Zifan
Jiang, Runxuan
Stone, Peter
Tewari, Ambuj
contents Multitask Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) approaches have gained increasing attention for its wide applications in many important Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, while recent advancements in MTRL theory have focused on the improved statistical efficiency by assuming a shared structure across tasks, exploration--a crucial aspect of RL--has been largely overlooked. This paper addresses this gap by showing that when an agent is trained on a sufficiently diverse set of tasks, a generic policy-sharing algorithm with myopic exploration design like $ε$-greedy that are inefficient in general can be sample-efficient for MTRL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical demonstration of the "exploration benefits" of MTRL. It may also shed light on the enigmatic success of the wide applications of myopic exploration in practice. To validate the role of diversity, we conduct experiments on synthetic robotic control environments, where the diverse task set aligns with the task selection by automatic curriculum learning, which is empirically shown to improve sample-efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_01636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sample Efficient Myopic Exploration Through Multitask Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Tasks
Xu, Ziping
Xu, Zifan
Jiang, Runxuan
Stone, Peter
Tewari, Ambuj
Machine Learning
Multitask Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) approaches have gained increasing attention for its wide applications in many important Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, while recent advancements in MTRL theory have focused on the improved statistical efficiency by assuming a shared structure across tasks, exploration--a crucial aspect of RL--has been largely overlooked. This paper addresses this gap by showing that when an agent is trained on a sufficiently diverse set of tasks, a generic policy-sharing algorithm with myopic exploration design like $ε$-greedy that are inefficient in general can be sample-efficient for MTRL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical demonstration of the "exploration benefits" of MTRL. It may also shed light on the enigmatic success of the wide applications of myopic exploration in practice. To validate the role of diversity, we conduct experiments on synthetic robotic control environments, where the diverse task set aligns with the task selection by automatic curriculum learning, which is empirically shown to improve sample-efficiency.
title Sample Efficient Myopic Exploration Through Multitask Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Tasks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01636