Efficient Off-Policy Learning for High-Dimensional Action Spaces

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Otto, Fabian, Becker, Philipp, Vien, Ngo Anh, Neumann, Gerhard
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866909494899900416
author Otto, Fabian
Becker, Philipp
Vien, Ngo Anh
Neumann, Gerhard
author_facet Otto, Fabian
Becker, Philipp
Vien, Ngo Anh
Neumann, Gerhard
contents Existing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on an explicit state-action-value function representation, which can be problematic in high-dimensional action spaces due to the curse of dimensionality. This reliance results in data inefficiency as maintaining a state-action-value function in such spaces is challenging. We present an efficient approach that utilizes only a state-value function as the critic for off-policy deep reinforcement learning. This approach, which we refer to as Vlearn, effectively circumvents the limitations of existing methods by eliminating the necessity for an explicit state-action-value function. To this end, we leverage a weighted importance sampling loss for learning deep value functions from off-policy data. While this is common for linear methods, it has not been combined with deep value function networks. This transfer to deep methods is not straightforward and requires novel design choices such as robust policy updates, twin value function networks to avoid an optimization bias, and importance weight clipping. We also present a novel analysis of the variance of our estimate compared to commonly used importance sampling estimators such as V-trace. Our approach improves sample complexity as well as final performance and ensures consistent and robust performance across various benchmark tasks. Eliminating the state-action-value function in Vlearn facilitates a streamlined learning process, yielding high-return agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_04453
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Off-Policy Learning for High-Dimensional Action Spaces
Otto, Fabian
Becker, Philipp
Vien, Ngo Anh
Neumann, Gerhard
Machine Learning
Existing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on an explicit state-action-value function representation, which can be problematic in high-dimensional action spaces due to the curse of dimensionality. This reliance results in data inefficiency as maintaining a state-action-value function in such spaces is challenging. We present an efficient approach that utilizes only a state-value function as the critic for off-policy deep reinforcement learning. This approach, which we refer to as Vlearn, effectively circumvents the limitations of existing methods by eliminating the necessity for an explicit state-action-value function. To this end, we leverage a weighted importance sampling loss for learning deep value functions from off-policy data. While this is common for linear methods, it has not been combined with deep value function networks. This transfer to deep methods is not straightforward and requires novel design choices such as robust policy updates, twin value function networks to avoid an optimization bias, and importance weight clipping. We also present a novel analysis of the variance of our estimate compared to commonly used importance sampling estimators such as V-trace. Our approach improves sample complexity as well as final performance and ensures consistent and robust performance across various benchmark tasks. Eliminating the state-action-value function in Vlearn facilitates a streamlined learning process, yielding high-return agents.
title Efficient Off-Policy Learning for High-Dimensional Action Spaces
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04453