Natural Policy Gradient and Actor Critic Methods for Constrained Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zeng, Sihan, Doan, Thinh T., Romberg, Justin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909189077467136
author Zeng, Sihan
Doan, Thinh T.
Romberg, Justin
author_facet Zeng, Sihan
Doan, Thinh T.
Romberg, Justin
contents Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average performance of the policy across tasks subject to bounds on the performance in each task. We consider solving this problem both in the centralized setting, where information for all tasks is accessible to a single server, and in the decentralized setting, where a network of agents, each given one task and observing local information, cooperate to find the solution of the globally constrained objective using local communication. We first propose a primal-dual algorithm that provably converges to the globally optimal solution of this constrained formulation under exact gradient evaluations. When the gradient is unknown, we further develop a sampled-based actor-critic algorithm that finds the optimal policy using online samples of state, action, and reward. Finally, we study the extension of the algorithm to the linear function approximation setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_02456
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Natural Policy Gradient and Actor Critic Methods for Constrained Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
Zeng, Sihan
Doan, Thinh T.
Romberg, Justin
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average performance of the policy across tasks subject to bounds on the performance in each task. We consider solving this problem both in the centralized setting, where information for all tasks is accessible to a single server, and in the decentralized setting, where a network of agents, each given one task and observing local information, cooperate to find the solution of the globally constrained objective using local communication. We first propose a primal-dual algorithm that provably converges to the globally optimal solution of this constrained formulation under exact gradient evaluations. When the gradient is unknown, we further develop a sampled-based actor-critic algorithm that finds the optimal policy using online samples of state, action, and reward. Finally, we study the extension of the algorithm to the linear function approximation setting.
title Natural Policy Gradient and Actor Critic Methods for Constrained Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02456