Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Fuhrer, Benjamin, Tessler, Chen, Dalal, Gal
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Fuhrer, Benjamin
Tessler, Chen
Dalal, Gal
author_facet Fuhrer, Benjamin
Tessler, Chen
Dalal, Gal
contents We present Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning (GBRL), a framework that adapts the strengths of gradient boosting trees (GBT) to reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. While neural networks (NNs) have become the de facto choice for RL, they face significant challenges with structured and categorical features and tend to generalize poorly to out-of-distribution samples. These are challenges for which GBTs have traditionally excelled in supervised learning. However, GBT's application in RL has been limited. The design of traditional GBT libraries is optimized for static datasets with fixed labels, making them incompatible with RL's dynamic nature, where both state distributions and reward signals evolve during training. GBRL overcomes this limitation by continuously interleaving tree construction with environment interaction. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that GBRL outperforms NNs in domains with structured observations and categorical features while maintaining competitive performance on standard continuous control benchmarks. Like its supervised learning counterpart, GBRL demonstrates superior robustness to out-of-distribution samples and better handles irregular state-action relationships.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_08250
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning
Fuhrer, Benjamin
Tessler, Chen
Dalal, Gal
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We present Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning (GBRL), a framework that adapts the strengths of gradient boosting trees (GBT) to reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. While neural networks (NNs) have become the de facto choice for RL, they face significant challenges with structured and categorical features and tend to generalize poorly to out-of-distribution samples. These are challenges for which GBTs have traditionally excelled in supervised learning. However, GBT's application in RL has been limited. The design of traditional GBT libraries is optimized for static datasets with fixed labels, making them incompatible with RL's dynamic nature, where both state distributions and reward signals evolve during training. GBRL overcomes this limitation by continuously interleaving tree construction with environment interaction. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that GBRL outperforms NNs in domains with structured observations and categorical features while maintaining competitive performance on standard continuous control benchmarks. Like its supervised learning counterpart, GBRL demonstrates superior robustness to out-of-distribution samples and better handles irregular state-action relationships.
title Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08250