Contextualized Hybrid Ensemble Q-learning: Learning Fast with Control Priors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cramer, Emma, Frauenknecht, Bernd, Sabirov, Ramil, Trimpe, Sebastian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cramer, Emma
Frauenknecht, Bernd
Sabirov, Ramil
Trimpe, Sebastian
author_facet Cramer, Emma
Frauenknecht, Bernd
Sabirov, Ramil
Trimpe, Sebastian
contents Combining Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a prior controller can yield the best out of two worlds: RL can solve complex nonlinear problems, while the control prior ensures safer exploration and speeds up training. Prior work largely blends both components with a fixed weight, neglecting that the RL agent's performance varies with the training progress and across regions in the state space. Therefore, we advocate for an adaptive strategy that dynamically adjusts the weighting based on the RL agent's current capabilities. We propose a new adaptive hybrid RL algorithm, Contextualized Hybrid Ensemble Q-learning (CHEQ). CHEQ combines three key ingredients: (i) a time-invariant formulation of the adaptive hybrid RL problem treating the adaptive weight as a context variable, (ii) a weight adaption mechanism based on the parametric uncertainty of a critic ensemble, and (iii) ensemble-based acceleration for data-efficient RL. Evaluating CHEQ on a car racing task reveals substantially stronger data efficiency, exploration safety, and transferability to unknown scenarios than state-of-the-art adaptive hybrid RL methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_19768
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contextualized Hybrid Ensemble Q-learning: Learning Fast with Control Priors
Cramer, Emma
Frauenknecht, Bernd
Sabirov, Ramil
Trimpe, Sebastian
Machine Learning
Combining Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a prior controller can yield the best out of two worlds: RL can solve complex nonlinear problems, while the control prior ensures safer exploration and speeds up training. Prior work largely blends both components with a fixed weight, neglecting that the RL agent's performance varies with the training progress and across regions in the state space. Therefore, we advocate for an adaptive strategy that dynamically adjusts the weighting based on the RL agent's current capabilities. We propose a new adaptive hybrid RL algorithm, Contextualized Hybrid Ensemble Q-learning (CHEQ). CHEQ combines three key ingredients: (i) a time-invariant formulation of the adaptive hybrid RL problem treating the adaptive weight as a context variable, (ii) a weight adaption mechanism based on the parametric uncertainty of a critic ensemble, and (iii) ensemble-based acceleration for data-efficient RL. Evaluating CHEQ on a car racing task reveals substantially stronger data efficiency, exploration safety, and transferability to unknown scenarios than state-of-the-art adaptive hybrid RL methods.
title Contextualized Hybrid Ensemble Q-learning: Learning Fast with Control Priors
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19768