Adaptive $Q$-Network: On-the-fly Target Selection for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Vincent, Théo, Wahren, Fabian, Peters, Jan, Belousov, Boris, D'Eramo, Carlo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Vincent, Théo
Wahren, Fabian
Peters, Jan
Belousov, Boris
D'Eramo, Carlo
author_facet Vincent, Théo
Wahren, Fabian
Peters, Jan
Belousov, Boris
D'Eramo, Carlo
contents Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is well known for being highly sensitive to hyperparameters, requiring practitioners substantial efforts to optimize them for the problem at hand. This also limits the applicability of RL in real-world scenarios. In recent years, the field of automated Reinforcement Learning (AutoRL) has grown in popularity by trying to address this issue. However, these approaches typically hinge on additional samples to select well-performing hyperparameters, hindering sample-efficiency and practicality. Furthermore, most AutoRL methods are heavily based on already existing AutoML methods, which were originally developed neglecting the additional challenges inherent to RL due to its non-stationarities. In this work, we propose a new approach for AutoRL, called Adaptive $Q$-Network (AdaQN), that is tailored to RL to take into account the non-stationarity of the optimization procedure without requiring additional samples. AdaQN learns several $Q$-functions, each one trained with different hyperparameters, which are updated online using the $Q$-function with the smallest approximation error as a shared target. Our selection scheme simultaneously handles different hyperparameters while coping with the non-stationarity induced by the RL optimization procedure and being orthogonal to any critic-based RL algorithm. We demonstrate that AdaQN is theoretically sound and empirically validate it in MuJoCo control problems and Atari $2600$ games, showing benefits in sample-efficiency, overall performance, robustness to stochasticity and training stability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16195
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive $Q$-Network: On-the-fly Target Selection for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Vincent, Théo
Wahren, Fabian
Peters, Jan
Belousov, Boris
D'Eramo, Carlo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is well known for being highly sensitive to hyperparameters, requiring practitioners substantial efforts to optimize them for the problem at hand. This also limits the applicability of RL in real-world scenarios. In recent years, the field of automated Reinforcement Learning (AutoRL) has grown in popularity by trying to address this issue. However, these approaches typically hinge on additional samples to select well-performing hyperparameters, hindering sample-efficiency and practicality. Furthermore, most AutoRL methods are heavily based on already existing AutoML methods, which were originally developed neglecting the additional challenges inherent to RL due to its non-stationarities. In this work, we propose a new approach for AutoRL, called Adaptive $Q$-Network (AdaQN), that is tailored to RL to take into account the non-stationarity of the optimization procedure without requiring additional samples. AdaQN learns several $Q$-functions, each one trained with different hyperparameters, which are updated online using the $Q$-function with the smallest approximation error as a shared target. Our selection scheme simultaneously handles different hyperparameters while coping with the non-stationarity induced by the RL optimization procedure and being orthogonal to any critic-based RL algorithm. We demonstrate that AdaQN is theoretically sound and empirically validate it in MuJoCo control problems and Atari $2600$ games, showing benefits in sample-efficiency, overall performance, robustness to stochasticity and training stability.
title Adaptive $Q$-Network: On-the-fly Target Selection for Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16195