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Main Authors: Christmann, Guilherme, Luo, Ying-Sheng, Mandala, Hanjaya, Chen, Wei-Chao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16632
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author Christmann, Guilherme
Luo, Ying-Sheng
Mandala, Hanjaya
Chen, Wei-Chao
author_facet Christmann, Guilherme
Luo, Ying-Sheng
Mandala, Hanjaya
Chen, Wei-Chao
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) policies are prone to high-frequency oscillations, especially undesirable when deploying to hardware in the real-world. In this paper, we identify, categorize, and compare methods from the literature that aim to mitigate high-frequency oscillations in deep RL. We define two broad classes: loss regularization and architectural methods. At their core, these methods incentivize learning a smooth mapping, such that nearby states in the input space produce nearby actions in the output space. We present benchmarks in terms of policy performance and control smoothness on traditional RL environments from the Gymnasium and a complex manipulation task, as well as three robotics locomotion tasks that include deployment and evaluation with real-world hardware. Finally, we also propose hybrid methods that combine elements from both loss regularization and architectural methods. We find that the best-performing hybrid outperforms other methods, and improves control smoothness by 26.8% over the baseline, with a worst-case performance degradation of just 2.8%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_16632
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking Smoothness and Reducing High-Frequency Oscillations in Continuous Control Policies
Christmann, Guilherme
Luo, Ying-Sheng
Mandala, Hanjaya
Chen, Wei-Chao
Robotics
Machine Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) policies are prone to high-frequency oscillations, especially undesirable when deploying to hardware in the real-world. In this paper, we identify, categorize, and compare methods from the literature that aim to mitigate high-frequency oscillations in deep RL. We define two broad classes: loss regularization and architectural methods. At their core, these methods incentivize learning a smooth mapping, such that nearby states in the input space produce nearby actions in the output space. We present benchmarks in terms of policy performance and control smoothness on traditional RL environments from the Gymnasium and a complex manipulation task, as well as three robotics locomotion tasks that include deployment and evaluation with real-world hardware. Finally, we also propose hybrid methods that combine elements from both loss regularization and architectural methods. We find that the best-performing hybrid outperforms other methods, and improves control smoothness by 26.8% over the baseline, with a worst-case performance degradation of just 2.8%.
title Benchmarking Smoothness and Reducing High-Frequency Oscillations in Continuous Control Policies
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16632