Massively Scaling Explicit Policy-conditioned Value Functions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bohlinger, Nico, Peters, Jan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bohlinger, Nico
Peters, Jan
author_facet Bohlinger, Nico
Peters, Jan
contents We introduce a scaling strategy for Explicit Policy-Conditioned Value Functions (EPVFs) that significantly improves performance on challenging continuous-control tasks. EPVFs learn a value function V(θ) that is explicitly conditioned on the policy parameters, enabling direct gradient-based updates to the parameters of any policy. However, EPVFs at scale struggle with unrestricted parameter growth and efficient exploration in the policy parameter space. To address these issues, we utilize massive parallelization with GPU-based simulators, big batch sizes, weight clipping and scaled peturbations. Our results show that EPVFs can be scaled to solve complex tasks, such as a custom Ant environment, and can compete with state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) baselines like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). We further explore action-based policy parameter representations from previous work and specialized neural network architectures to efficiently handle weight-space features, which have not been used in the context of DRL before.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11949
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Massively Scaling Explicit Policy-conditioned Value Functions
Bohlinger, Nico
Peters, Jan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce a scaling strategy for Explicit Policy-Conditioned Value Functions (EPVFs) that significantly improves performance on challenging continuous-control tasks. EPVFs learn a value function V(θ) that is explicitly conditioned on the policy parameters, enabling direct gradient-based updates to the parameters of any policy. However, EPVFs at scale struggle with unrestricted parameter growth and efficient exploration in the policy parameter space. To address these issues, we utilize massive parallelization with GPU-based simulators, big batch sizes, weight clipping and scaled peturbations. Our results show that EPVFs can be scaled to solve complex tasks, such as a custom Ant environment, and can compete with state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) baselines like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). We further explore action-based policy parameter representations from previous work and specialized neural network architectures to efficiently handle weight-space features, which have not been used in the context of DRL before.
title Massively Scaling Explicit Policy-conditioned Value Functions
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11949