Continuous Control with Coarse-to-fine Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Seo, Younggyo, Uruç, Jafar, James, Stephen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Seo, Younggyo
Uruç, Jafar
James, Stephen
author_facet Seo, Younggyo
Uruç, Jafar
James, Stephen
contents Despite recent advances in improving the sample-efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, designing an RL algorithm that can be practically deployed in real-world environments remains a challenge. In this paper, we present Coarse-to-fine Reinforcement Learning (CRL), a framework that trains RL agents to zoom-into a continuous action space in a coarse-to-fine manner, enabling the use of stable, sample-efficient value-based RL algorithms for fine-grained continuous control tasks. Our key idea is to train agents that output actions by iterating the procedure of (i) discretizing the continuous action space into multiple intervals and (ii) selecting the interval with the highest Q-value to further discretize at the next level. We then introduce a concrete, value-based algorithm within the CRL framework called Coarse-to-fine Q-Network (CQN). Our experiments demonstrate that CQN significantly outperforms RL and behavior cloning baselines on 20 sparsely-rewarded RLBench manipulation tasks with a modest number of environment interactions and expert demonstrations. We also show that CQN robustly learns to solve real-world manipulation tasks within a few minutes of online training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07787
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continuous Control with Coarse-to-fine Reinforcement Learning
Seo, Younggyo
Uruç, Jafar
James, Stephen
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Despite recent advances in improving the sample-efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, designing an RL algorithm that can be practically deployed in real-world environments remains a challenge. In this paper, we present Coarse-to-fine Reinforcement Learning (CRL), a framework that trains RL agents to zoom-into a continuous action space in a coarse-to-fine manner, enabling the use of stable, sample-efficient value-based RL algorithms for fine-grained continuous control tasks. Our key idea is to train agents that output actions by iterating the procedure of (i) discretizing the continuous action space into multiple intervals and (ii) selecting the interval with the highest Q-value to further discretize at the next level. We then introduce a concrete, value-based algorithm within the CRL framework called Coarse-to-fine Q-Network (CQN). Our experiments demonstrate that CQN significantly outperforms RL and behavior cloning baselines on 20 sparsely-rewarded RLBench manipulation tasks with a modest number of environment interactions and expert demonstrations. We also show that CQN robustly learns to solve real-world manipulation tasks within a few minutes of online training.
title Continuous Control with Coarse-to-fine Reinforcement Learning
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07787