Efficient Multi-Policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Shuze Daniel, Chen, Claire, Zhang, Shangtong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Liu, Shuze Daniel
Chen, Claire
Zhang, Shangtong
author_facet Liu, Shuze Daniel
Chen, Claire
Zhang, Shangtong
contents To unbiasedly evaluate multiple target policies, the dominant approach among RL practitioners is to run and evaluate each target policy separately. However, this evaluation method is far from efficient because samples are not shared across policies, and running target policies to evaluate themselves is actually not optimal. In this paper, we address these two weaknesses by designing a tailored behavior policy to reduce the variance of estimators across all target policies. Theoretically, we prove that executing this behavior policy with manyfold fewer samples outperforms on-policy evaluation on every target policy under characterized conditions. Empirically, we show our estimator has a substantially lower variance compared with previous best methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in a broad range of environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_08706
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Multi-Policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning
Liu, Shuze Daniel
Chen, Claire
Zhang, Shangtong
Machine Learning
To unbiasedly evaluate multiple target policies, the dominant approach among RL practitioners is to run and evaluate each target policy separately. However, this evaluation method is far from efficient because samples are not shared across policies, and running target policies to evaluate themselves is actually not optimal. In this paper, we address these two weaknesses by designing a tailored behavior policy to reduce the variance of estimators across all target policies. Theoretically, we prove that executing this behavior policy with manyfold fewer samples outperforms on-policy evaluation on every target policy under characterized conditions. Empirically, we show our estimator has a substantially lower variance compared with previous best methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in a broad range of environments.
title Efficient Multi-Policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08706