Reinforcement Learning with Intrinsically Motivated Feedback Graph for Lost-sales Inventory Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Zifan, Li, Xinran, Chen, Shibo, Li, Gen, Jiang, Jiashuo, Zhang, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Liu, Zifan
Li, Xinran
Chen, Shibo
Li, Gen
Jiang, Jiashuo
Zhang, Jun
author_facet Liu, Zifan
Li, Xinran
Chen, Shibo
Li, Gen
Jiang, Jiashuo
Zhang, Jun
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be well-performed and general-purpose in the inventory control (IC). However, further improvement of RL algorithms in the IC domain is impeded due to two limitations of online experience. First, online experience is expensive to acquire in real-world applications. With the low sample efficiency nature of RL algorithms, it would take extensive time to train the RL policy to convergence. Second, online experience may not reflect the true demand due to the lost sales phenomenon typical in IC, which makes the learning process more challenging. To address the above challenges, we propose a decision framework that combines reinforcement learning with feedback graph (RLFG) and intrinsically motivated exploration (IME) to boost sample efficiency. In particular, we first take advantage of the inherent properties of lost-sales IC problems and design the feedback graph (FG) specially for lost-sales IC problems to generate abundant side experiences aid RL updates. Then we conduct a rigorous theoretical analysis of how the designed FG reduces the sample complexity of RL methods. Based on the theoretical insights, we design an intrinsic reward to direct the RL agent to explore to the state-action space with more side experiences, further exploiting FG's power. Experimental results demonstrate that our method greatly improves the sample efficiency of applying RL in IC. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RLIMFG4IC-811D/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_18351
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reinforcement Learning with Intrinsically Motivated Feedback Graph for Lost-sales Inventory Control
Liu, Zifan
Li, Xinran
Chen, Shibo
Li, Gen
Jiang, Jiashuo
Zhang, Jun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be well-performed and general-purpose in the inventory control (IC). However, further improvement of RL algorithms in the IC domain is impeded due to two limitations of online experience. First, online experience is expensive to acquire in real-world applications. With the low sample efficiency nature of RL algorithms, it would take extensive time to train the RL policy to convergence. Second, online experience may not reflect the true demand due to the lost sales phenomenon typical in IC, which makes the learning process more challenging. To address the above challenges, we propose a decision framework that combines reinforcement learning with feedback graph (RLFG) and intrinsically motivated exploration (IME) to boost sample efficiency. In particular, we first take advantage of the inherent properties of lost-sales IC problems and design the feedback graph (FG) specially for lost-sales IC problems to generate abundant side experiences aid RL updates. Then we conduct a rigorous theoretical analysis of how the designed FG reduces the sample complexity of RL methods. Based on the theoretical insights, we design an intrinsic reward to direct the RL agent to explore to the state-action space with more side experiences, further exploiting FG's power. Experimental results demonstrate that our method greatly improves the sample efficiency of applying RL in IC. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RLIMFG4IC-811D/
title Reinforcement Learning with Intrinsically Motivated Feedback Graph for Lost-sales Inventory Control
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18351