Proximal Curriculum with Task Correlations for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Tzannetos, Georgios, Kamalaruban, Parameswaran, Singla, Adish
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Tzannetos, Georgios
Kamalaruban, Parameswaran
Singla, Adish
author_facet Tzannetos, Georgios
Kamalaruban, Parameswaran
Singla, Adish
contents Curriculum design for reinforcement learning (RL) can speed up an agent's learning process and help it learn to perform well on complex tasks. However, existing techniques typically require domain-specific hyperparameter tuning, involve expensive optimization procedures for task selection, or are suitable only for specific learning objectives. In this work, we consider curriculum design in contextual multi-task settings where the agent's final performance is measured w.r.t. a target distribution over complex tasks. We base our curriculum design on the Zone of Proximal Development concept, which has proven to be effective in accelerating the learning process of RL agents for uniform distribution over all tasks. We propose a novel curriculum, ProCuRL-Target, that effectively balances the need for selecting tasks that are not too difficult for the agent while progressing the agent's learning toward the target distribution via leveraging task correlations. We theoretically justify the task selection strategy of ProCuRL-Target by analyzing a simple learning setting with REINFORCE learner model. Our experimental results across various domains with challenging target task distributions affirm the effectiveness of our curriculum strategy over state-of-the-art baselines in accelerating the training process of deep RL agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_02481
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Proximal Curriculum with Task Correlations for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Tzannetos, Georgios
Kamalaruban, Parameswaran
Singla, Adish
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Curriculum design for reinforcement learning (RL) can speed up an agent's learning process and help it learn to perform well on complex tasks. However, existing techniques typically require domain-specific hyperparameter tuning, involve expensive optimization procedures for task selection, or are suitable only for specific learning objectives. In this work, we consider curriculum design in contextual multi-task settings where the agent's final performance is measured w.r.t. a target distribution over complex tasks. We base our curriculum design on the Zone of Proximal Development concept, which has proven to be effective in accelerating the learning process of RL agents for uniform distribution over all tasks. We propose a novel curriculum, ProCuRL-Target, that effectively balances the need for selecting tasks that are not too difficult for the agent while progressing the agent's learning toward the target distribution via leveraging task correlations. We theoretically justify the task selection strategy of ProCuRL-Target by analyzing a simple learning setting with REINFORCE learner model. Our experimental results across various domains with challenging target task distributions affirm the effectiveness of our curriculum strategy over state-of-the-art baselines in accelerating the training process of deep RL agents.
title Proximal Curriculum with Task Correlations for Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02481