Personalized Observation Normalization for Federated Reinforcement Learning in Simulation Environments with Heterogeneity

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Pang, Yiran, Ni, Zhen, Zhong, Xiangnan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Pang, Yiran
Ni, Zhen
Zhong, Xiangnan
author_facet Pang, Yiran
Ni, Zhen
Zhong, Xiangnan
contents Federated reinforcement learning (FedRL) enables multiple agents to collaboratively train a global policy without sharing raw data, making it ideal for privacy-sensitive applications. However, FedRL faces challenges in heterogeneous environments where differing state-transition dynamics lead to non-identical input distributions and imbalanced parameter updates during aggregation. Therefore, this paper develops a personalized observation normalization (PON) method, allowing each agent to locally normalize raw state inputs using a continuously updated running mean and variance. This design ensures consistent scaling of local feature without overshadowing across agents during aggregation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that sharing normalization parameters across agents is ineffective due to the diverse local input distributions, which highlights the necessity of personalized statistics. Experiments on heterogeneous MuJoCo tasks show that our developed PON accelerates training and achieves superior performance compared to baseline methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_27385
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Personalized Observation Normalization for Federated Reinforcement Learning in Simulation Environments with Heterogeneity
Pang, Yiran
Ni, Zhen
Zhong, Xiangnan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Federated reinforcement learning (FedRL) enables multiple agents to collaboratively train a global policy without sharing raw data, making it ideal for privacy-sensitive applications. However, FedRL faces challenges in heterogeneous environments where differing state-transition dynamics lead to non-identical input distributions and imbalanced parameter updates during aggregation. Therefore, this paper develops a personalized observation normalization (PON) method, allowing each agent to locally normalize raw state inputs using a continuously updated running mean and variance. This design ensures consistent scaling of local feature without overshadowing across agents during aggregation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that sharing normalization parameters across agents is ineffective due to the diverse local input distributions, which highlights the necessity of personalized statistics. Experiments on heterogeneous MuJoCo tasks show that our developed PON accelerates training and achieves superior performance compared to baseline methods.
title Personalized Observation Normalization for Federated Reinforcement Learning in Simulation Environments with Heterogeneity
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27385