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Autores principales: Maus, Tom, Atamna, Asma, Glasmachers, Tobias
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00762
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author Maus, Tom
Atamna, Asma
Glasmachers, Tobias
author_facet Maus, Tom
Atamna, Asma
Glasmachers, Tobias
contents Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant potential in certain real-world industrial applications, yet its broader deployment remains limited by inherent challenges such as sample inefficiency and unstable learning dynamics. This study investigates the utilization of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) as a mechanism for improving RL performance in an industrially inspired sorting environment. We propose a novel approach in which GA-generated expert demonstrations are used to enhance policy learning. These demonstrations are incorporated into a Deep Q-Network (DQN) replay buffer for experience-based learning and utilized as warm-start trajectories for Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agents to accelerate training convergence. Our experiments compare standard RL training with rule-based heuristics, brute-force optimization, and demonstration data, revealing that GA-derived demonstrations significantly improve RL performance. Notably, PPO agents initialized with GA-generated data achieved superior cumulative rewards, highlighting the potential of hybrid learning paradigms, where heuristic search methods complement data-driven RL. The utilized framework is publicly available and enables further research into adaptive RL strategies for real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_00762
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging Genetic Algorithms for Efficient Demonstration Generation in Real-World Reinforcement Learning Environments
Maus, Tom
Atamna, Asma
Glasmachers, Tobias
Machine Learning
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant potential in certain real-world industrial applications, yet its broader deployment remains limited by inherent challenges such as sample inefficiency and unstable learning dynamics. This study investigates the utilization of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) as a mechanism for improving RL performance in an industrially inspired sorting environment. We propose a novel approach in which GA-generated expert demonstrations are used to enhance policy learning. These demonstrations are incorporated into a Deep Q-Network (DQN) replay buffer for experience-based learning and utilized as warm-start trajectories for Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agents to accelerate training convergence. Our experiments compare standard RL training with rule-based heuristics, brute-force optimization, and demonstration data, revealing that GA-derived demonstrations significantly improve RL performance. Notably, PPO agents initialized with GA-generated data achieved superior cumulative rewards, highlighting the potential of hybrid learning paradigms, where heuristic search methods complement data-driven RL. The utilized framework is publicly available and enables further research into adaptive RL strategies for real-world applications.
title Leveraging Genetic Algorithms for Efficient Demonstration Generation in Real-World Reinforcement Learning Environments
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00762