Global Reinforcement Learning: Beyond Linear and Convex Rewards via Submodular Semi-gradient Methods

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: De Santi, Riccardo, Prajapat, Manish, Krause, Andreas
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author De Santi, Riccardo
Prajapat, Manish
Krause, Andreas
author_facet De Santi, Riccardo
Prajapat, Manish
Krause, Andreas
contents In classic Reinforcement Learning (RL), the agent maximizes an additive objective of the visited states, e.g., a value function. Unfortunately, objectives of this type cannot model many real-world applications such as experiment design, exploration, imitation learning, and risk-averse RL to name a few. This is due to the fact that additive objectives disregard interactions between states that are crucial for certain tasks. To tackle this problem, we introduce Global RL (GRL), where rewards are globally defined over trajectories instead of locally over states. Global rewards can capture negative interactions among states, e.g., in exploration, via submodularity, positive interactions, e.g., synergetic effects, via supermodularity, while mixed interactions via combinations of them. By exploiting ideas from submodular optimization, we propose a novel algorithmic scheme that converts any GRL problem to a sequence of classic RL problems and solves it efficiently with curvature-dependent approximation guarantees. We also provide hardness of approximation results and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several GRL instances.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_09905
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Global Reinforcement Learning: Beyond Linear and Convex Rewards via Submodular Semi-gradient Methods
De Santi, Riccardo
Prajapat, Manish
Krause, Andreas
Machine Learning
In classic Reinforcement Learning (RL), the agent maximizes an additive objective of the visited states, e.g., a value function. Unfortunately, objectives of this type cannot model many real-world applications such as experiment design, exploration, imitation learning, and risk-averse RL to name a few. This is due to the fact that additive objectives disregard interactions between states that are crucial for certain tasks. To tackle this problem, we introduce Global RL (GRL), where rewards are globally defined over trajectories instead of locally over states. Global rewards can capture negative interactions among states, e.g., in exploration, via submodularity, positive interactions, e.g., synergetic effects, via supermodularity, while mixed interactions via combinations of them. By exploiting ideas from submodular optimization, we propose a novel algorithmic scheme that converts any GRL problem to a sequence of classic RL problems and solves it efficiently with curvature-dependent approximation guarantees. We also provide hardness of approximation results and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several GRL instances.
title Global Reinforcement Learning: Beyond Linear and Convex Rewards via Submodular Semi-gradient Methods
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09905