Decomposing Control Lyapunov Functions for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lopez, Antonio, Fridovich-Keil, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929281568866304
author Lopez, Antonio
Fridovich-Keil, David
author_facet Lopez, Antonio
Fridovich-Keil, David
contents Recent methods using Reinforcement Learning (RL) have proven to be successful for training intelligent agents in unknown environments. However, RL has not been applied widely in real-world robotics scenarios. This is because current state-of-the-art RL methods require large amounts of data to learn a specific task, leading to unreasonable costs when deploying the agent to collect data in real-world applications. In this paper, we build from existing work that reshapes the reward function in RL by introducing a Control Lyapunov Function (CLF), which is demonstrated to reduce the sample complexity. Still, this formulation requires knowing a CLF of the system, but due to the lack of a general method, it is often a challenge to identify a suitable CLF. Existing work can compute low-dimensional CLFs via a Hamilton-Jacobi reachability procedure. However, this class of methods becomes intractable on high-dimensional systems, a problem that we address by using a system decomposition technique to compute what we call Decomposed Control Lyapunov Functions (DCLFs). We use the computed DCLF for reward shaping, which we show improves RL performance. Through multiple examples, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, where our method finds a policy to successfully land a quadcopter in less than half the amount of real-world data required by the state-of-the-art Soft-Actor Critic algorithm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_12210
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decomposing Control Lyapunov Functions for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Lopez, Antonio
Fridovich-Keil, David
Systems and Control
Machine Learning
Recent methods using Reinforcement Learning (RL) have proven to be successful for training intelligent agents in unknown environments. However, RL has not been applied widely in real-world robotics scenarios. This is because current state-of-the-art RL methods require large amounts of data to learn a specific task, leading to unreasonable costs when deploying the agent to collect data in real-world applications. In this paper, we build from existing work that reshapes the reward function in RL by introducing a Control Lyapunov Function (CLF), which is demonstrated to reduce the sample complexity. Still, this formulation requires knowing a CLF of the system, but due to the lack of a general method, it is often a challenge to identify a suitable CLF. Existing work can compute low-dimensional CLFs via a Hamilton-Jacobi reachability procedure. However, this class of methods becomes intractable on high-dimensional systems, a problem that we address by using a system decomposition technique to compute what we call Decomposed Control Lyapunov Functions (DCLFs). We use the computed DCLF for reward shaping, which we show improves RL performance. Through multiple examples, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, where our method finds a policy to successfully land a quadcopter in less than half the amount of real-world data required by the state-of-the-art Soft-Actor Critic algorithm.
title Decomposing Control Lyapunov Functions for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
topic Systems and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12210