提出新方法建模复杂延迟奖励,提升强化学习性能。
Beyond Simple Sum of Delayed Rewards: Non-Markovian Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning
- 用非马尔可夫成分加权求和建模序列奖励结构
- 在运动控制任务中优于基线方法,奖励预测更贴近真实反馈
- 适合需要理解长程依赖与关键步骤的强化学习场景
强化学习通过奖励信号使智能体习得多种技能。然而,设计高质量的实例级奖励通常需要大量人工投入。近年来,基于延迟奖励的强化学习方法关注从周期性呈现的奖励中学习,这些奖励可由人类评估者根据行为序列的整体表现给出。但传统方法假设存在底层马尔可夫奖励,且观测到的延迟奖励仅为实例奖励之和,这往往与现实不符。本文提出从复合延迟奖励中学习(RLCoDe)的问题,放宽了这一强假设。我们认为延迟奖励可能源于更复杂的结构,反映整个序列的综合贡献。为此,提出一种建模复合延迟奖励的框架,使用非马尔可夫成分的加权和来捕捉各步的差异化贡献。基于此框架,提出复合延迟奖励变换器(CoDeTr),引入序列内注意力机制有效建模这些贡献。在具有挑战性的运动控制任务上进行实验,代理接收由可观测步奖励的复合函数计算出的延迟奖励。结果表明,CoDeTr 在所有评估指标上均持续优于基线方法,并能准确识别序列中最重要的时间步,预测奖励与环境反馈高度一致。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement Learning (RL) empowers agents to acquire various skills by learning from reward signals. Unfortunately, designing high-quality instance-level rewards often demands significant effort. An emerging alternative, RL with delayed reward, focuses on learning from rewards presented periodically, which can be obtained from human evaluators assessing the agent's performance over sequences of behaviors. However, traditional methods in this domain assume the existence of underlying Markovian rewards and that the observed delayed reward is simply the sum of instance-level rewards, both of which often do not align well with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the problem of RL from Composite Delayed Reward (RLCoDe), which generalizes traditional RL from delayed rewards by eliminating the strong assumption. We suggest that the delayed reward may arise from a more complex structure reflecting the overall contribution of the sequence. To address this problem, we present a framework for modeling composite delayed rewards, using a weighted sum of non-Markovian components to capture the different contributions of individual steps. Building on this framework, we propose Composite Delayed Reward Transformer (CoDeTr), which incorporates a specialized in-sequence attention mechanism to effectively model these contributions. We conduct experiments on challenging locomotion tasks where the agent receives delayed rewards computed from composite functions of observable step rewards. The experimental results indicate that CoDeTr consistently outperforms baseline methods across evaluated metrics. Additionally, we demonstrate that it effectively identifies the most significant time steps within the sequence and accurately predicts rewards that closely reflect the environment feedback.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。