To Switch or Not to Switch? Balanced Policy Switching in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ma, Tao, Yang, Xuzhi, Szabo, Zoltan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ma, Tao
Yang, Xuzhi
Szabo, Zoltan
author_facet Ma, Tao
Yang, Xuzhi
Szabo, Zoltan
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) -- finding the optimal behaviour (also referred to as policy) maximizing the collected long-term cumulative reward -- is among the most influential approaches in machine learning with a large number of successful applications. In several decision problems, however, one faces the possibility of policy switching -- changing from the current policy to a new one -- which incurs a non-negligible cost, and in the decision one is limited to using historical data without the availability for further online interaction. Despite the inevitable importance of this offline learning scenario, to our best knowledge, very little effort has been made to tackle the key problem of balancing between the gain and the cost of switching in a flexible and principled way. Leveraging ideas from the area of optimal transport, we initialize the systematic study of policy switching in offline RL. We establish fundamental properties and design a Net Actor-Critic algorithm for the proposed novel switching formulation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on multiple robot control benchmarks of the Gymnasium and traffic light control from SUMO-RL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_01837
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Switch or Not to Switch? Balanced Policy Switching in Offline Reinforcement Learning
Ma, Tao
Yang, Xuzhi
Szabo, Zoltan
Machine Learning
Information Theory
Reinforcement learning (RL) -- finding the optimal behaviour (also referred to as policy) maximizing the collected long-term cumulative reward -- is among the most influential approaches in machine learning with a large number of successful applications. In several decision problems, however, one faces the possibility of policy switching -- changing from the current policy to a new one -- which incurs a non-negligible cost, and in the decision one is limited to using historical data without the availability for further online interaction. Despite the inevitable importance of this offline learning scenario, to our best knowledge, very little effort has been made to tackle the key problem of balancing between the gain and the cost of switching in a flexible and principled way. Leveraging ideas from the area of optimal transport, we initialize the systematic study of policy switching in offline RL. We establish fundamental properties and design a Net Actor-Critic algorithm for the proposed novel switching formulation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on multiple robot control benchmarks of the Gymnasium and traffic light control from SUMO-RL.
title To Switch or Not to Switch? Balanced Policy Switching in Offline Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01837