Oracle-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Max Value Ensembles

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hussing, Marcel, Kearns, Michael, Roth, Aaron, Sengupta, Sikata Bela, Sorrell, Jessica
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Hussing, Marcel
Kearns, Michael
Roth, Aaron
Sengupta, Sikata Bela
Sorrell, Jessica
author_facet Hussing, Marcel
Kearns, Michael
Roth, Aaron
Sengupta, Sikata Bela
Sorrell, Jessica
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardinality) and experimentally (where function approximation and policy gradient techniques often scale poorly and suffer from instability and high variance). One line of research attempting to address these difficulties makes the natural assumption that we are given a collection of heuristic base or $\textit{constituent}$ policies upon which we would like to improve in a scalable manner. In this work we aim to compete with the $\textit{max-following policy}$, which at each state follows the action of whichever constituent policy has the highest value. The max-following policy is always at least as good as the best constituent policy, and may be considerably better. Our main result is an efficient algorithm that learns to compete with the max-following policy, given only access to the constituent policies (but not their value functions). In contrast to prior work in similar settings, our theoretical results require only the minimal assumption of an ERM oracle for value function approximation for the constituent policies (and not the global optimal policy or the max-following policy itself) on samplable distributions. We illustrate our algorithm's experimental effectiveness and behavior on several robotic simulation testbeds.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16739
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Oracle-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Max Value Ensembles
Hussing, Marcel
Kearns, Michael
Roth, Aaron
Sengupta, Sikata Bela
Sorrell, Jessica
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardinality) and experimentally (where function approximation and policy gradient techniques often scale poorly and suffer from instability and high variance). One line of research attempting to address these difficulties makes the natural assumption that we are given a collection of heuristic base or $\textit{constituent}$ policies upon which we would like to improve in a scalable manner. In this work we aim to compete with the $\textit{max-following policy}$, which at each state follows the action of whichever constituent policy has the highest value. The max-following policy is always at least as good as the best constituent policy, and may be considerably better. Our main result is an efficient algorithm that learns to compete with the max-following policy, given only access to the constituent policies (but not their value functions). In contrast to prior work in similar settings, our theoretical results require only the minimal assumption of an ERM oracle for value function approximation for the constituent policies (and not the global optimal policy or the max-following policy itself) on samplable distributions. We illustrate our algorithm's experimental effectiveness and behavior on several robotic simulation testbeds.
title Oracle-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Max Value Ensembles
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16739