无需保留离线数据,也能高效完成强化学习在线微调。
Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning Need Not Retain Offline Data
- 用少量预训练策略的滚动数据进行暖启动,快速校准价值函数。
- 在不依赖离线数据情况下,训练速度更快且性能更高。
- 适合需要快速迭代、节省存储的在线强化学习场景。
现代机器学习通常先在多样化数据上预训练,再进行特定任务微调。在强化学习中,这表现为使用历史数据进行离线强化学习,随后通过在线交互数据快速微调。现有方法大多需持续使用离线数据以保证稳定性和性能,但这代价高昂且限制了性能提升。本文证明:只要采用合适设计的在线强化学习方法,微调离线预训练模型时无需保留离线数据。我们分析发现,持续训练离线数据主要作用是防止微调初期因分布不匹配导致的价值函数突然发散,从而造成遗忘。为此提出温启动强化学习(WSRL),通过极少量预训练策略的滚动数据进行暖启动,快速校准离线Q函数至在线分布,实现完全丢弃离线数据而不影响稳定性。实验表明,WSRL可在不保留任何离线数据的前提下,比现有算法更快学习并达到更高性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The modern paradigm in machine learning involves pre-training on diverse data, followed by task-specific fine-tuning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this translates to learning via offline RL on a diverse historical dataset, followed by rapid online RL fine-tuning using interaction data. Most RL fine-tuning methods require continued training on offline data for stability and performance. However, this is undesirable because training on diverse offline data is slow and expensive for large datasets, and in principle, also limit the performance improvement possible because of constraints or pessimism on offline data. In this paper, we show that retaining offline data is unnecessary as long as we use a properly-designed online RL approach for fine-tuning offline RL initializations. To build this approach, we start by analyzing the role of retaining offline data in online fine-tuning. We find that continued training on offline data is mostly useful for preventing a sudden divergence in the value function at the onset of fine-tuning, caused by a distribution mismatch between the offline data and online rollouts. This divergence typically results in unlearning and forgetting the benefits of offline pre-training. Our approach, Warm-start RL (WSRL), mitigates the catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained initializations using a very simple idea. WSRL employs a warmup phase that seeds the online RL run with a very small number of rollouts from the pre-trained policy to do fast online RL. The data collected during warmup helps ``recalibrate'' the offline Q-function to the online distribution, allowing us to completely discard offline data without destabilizing the online RL fine-tuning. We show that WSRL is able to fine-tune without retaining any offline data, and is able to learn faster and attains higher performance than existing algorithms irrespective of whether they retain offline data or not.
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