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Main Author: Spigler, Giacomo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15134
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author Spigler, Giacomo
author_facet Spigler, Giacomo
contents We introduce Proximal Policy Distillation (PPD), a novel policy distillation method that integrates student-driven distillation and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to increase sample efficiency and to leverage the additional rewards that the student policy collects during distillation. To assess the efficacy of our method, we compare PPD with two common alternatives, student-distill and teacher-distill, over a wide range of reinforcement learning environments that include discrete actions and continuous control (ATARI, Mujoco, and Procgen). For each environment and method, we perform distillation to a set of target student neural networks that are smaller, identical (self-distillation), or larger than the teacher network. Our findings indicate that PPD improves sample efficiency and produces better student policies compared to typical policy distillation approaches. Moreover, PPD demonstrates greater robustness than alternative methods when distilling policies from imperfect demonstrations. The code for the paper is released as part of a new Python library built on top of stable-baselines3 to facilitate policy distillation: `sb3-distill'.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_15134
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Proximal Policy Distillation
Spigler, Giacomo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce Proximal Policy Distillation (PPD), a novel policy distillation method that integrates student-driven distillation and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to increase sample efficiency and to leverage the additional rewards that the student policy collects during distillation. To assess the efficacy of our method, we compare PPD with two common alternatives, student-distill and teacher-distill, over a wide range of reinforcement learning environments that include discrete actions and continuous control (ATARI, Mujoco, and Procgen). For each environment and method, we perform distillation to a set of target student neural networks that are smaller, identical (self-distillation), or larger than the teacher network. Our findings indicate that PPD improves sample efficiency and produces better student policies compared to typical policy distillation approaches. Moreover, PPD demonstrates greater robustness than alternative methods when distilling policies from imperfect demonstrations. The code for the paper is released as part of a new Python library built on top of stable-baselines3 to facilitate policy distillation: `sb3-distill'.
title Proximal Policy Distillation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15134