Human-Readable Programs as Actors of Reinforcement Learning Agents Using Critic-Moderated Evolution

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Hauptverfasser: Deproost, Senne, Steckelmacher, Denis, Nowé, Ann
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Deproost, Senne
Steckelmacher, Denis
Nowé, Ann
author_facet Deproost, Senne
Steckelmacher, Denis
Nowé, Ann
contents With Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) being increasingly considered for the control of real-world systems, the lack of transparency of the neural network at the core of RL becomes a concern. Programmatic Reinforcement Learning (PRL) is able to to create representations of this black-box in the form of source code, not only increasing the explainability of the controller but also allowing for user adaptations. However, these methods focus on distilling a black-box policy into a program and do so after learning using the Mean Squared Error between produced and wanted behaviour, discarding other elements of the RL algorithm. The distilled policy may therefore perform significantly worse than the black-box learned policy. In this paper, we propose to directly learn a program as the policy of an RL agent. We build on TD3 and use its critics as the basis of the objective function of a genetic algorithm that syntheses the program. Our approach builds the program during training, as opposed to after the fact. This steers the program to actual high rewards, instead of a simple Mean Squared Error. Also, our approach leverages the TD3 critics to achieve high sample-efficiency, as opposed to pure genetic methods that rely on Monte-Carlo evaluations. Our experiments demonstrate the validity, explainability and sample-efficiency of our approach in a simple gridworld environment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_21940
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Human-Readable Programs as Actors of Reinforcement Learning Agents Using Critic-Moderated Evolution
Deproost, Senne
Steckelmacher, Denis
Nowé, Ann
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
With Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) being increasingly considered for the control of real-world systems, the lack of transparency of the neural network at the core of RL becomes a concern. Programmatic Reinforcement Learning (PRL) is able to to create representations of this black-box in the form of source code, not only increasing the explainability of the controller but also allowing for user adaptations. However, these methods focus on distilling a black-box policy into a program and do so after learning using the Mean Squared Error between produced and wanted behaviour, discarding other elements of the RL algorithm. The distilled policy may therefore perform significantly worse than the black-box learned policy. In this paper, we propose to directly learn a program as the policy of an RL agent. We build on TD3 and use its critics as the basis of the objective function of a genetic algorithm that syntheses the program. Our approach builds the program during training, as opposed to after the fact. This steers the program to actual high rewards, instead of a simple Mean Squared Error. Also, our approach leverages the TD3 critics to achieve high sample-efficiency, as opposed to pure genetic methods that rely on Monte-Carlo evaluations. Our experiments demonstrate the validity, explainability and sample-efficiency of our approach in a simple gridworld environment.
title Human-Readable Programs as Actors of Reinforcement Learning Agents Using Critic-Moderated Evolution
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21940