Deterministic Exploration via Stationary Bellman Error Maximization

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Griesbach, Sebastian, D'Eramo, Carlo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910684894199808
author Griesbach, Sebastian
D'Eramo, Carlo
author_facet Griesbach, Sebastian
D'Eramo, Carlo
contents Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the actions, indirectly via entropy maximization, or add intrinsic rewards that encourage the agent to steer to novel regions of the state space. Another previously seen idea is to use the Bellman error as a separate optimization objective for exploration. In this paper, we introduce three modifications to stabilize the latter and arrive at a deterministic exploration policy. Our separate exploration agent is informed about the state of the exploitation, thus enabling it to account for previous experiences. Further components are introduced to make the exploration objective agnostic toward the episode length and to mitigate instability introduced by far-off-policy learning. Our experimental results show that our approach can outperform $\varepsilon$-greedy in dense and sparse reward settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_23840
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deterministic Exploration via Stationary Bellman Error Maximization
Griesbach, Sebastian
D'Eramo, Carlo
Machine Learning
Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the actions, indirectly via entropy maximization, or add intrinsic rewards that encourage the agent to steer to novel regions of the state space. Another previously seen idea is to use the Bellman error as a separate optimization objective for exploration. In this paper, we introduce three modifications to stabilize the latter and arrive at a deterministic exploration policy. Our separate exploration agent is informed about the state of the exploitation, thus enabling it to account for previous experiences. Further components are introduced to make the exploration objective agnostic toward the episode length and to mitigate instability introduced by far-off-policy learning. Our experimental results show that our approach can outperform $\varepsilon$-greedy in dense and sparse reward settings.
title Deterministic Exploration via Stationary Bellman Error Maximization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23840