arXiv:2501.11533cs.AIcs.LG2025-01被引 16

比较四种内在奖励对强化学习探索的影响,发现状态计数在低维观测下最佳,最大熵更稳健。

The impact of intrinsic rewards on exploration in Reinforcement Learning

  • 用四种内在奖励分别推动状态、策略和技能层面的多样性进行探索
  • 状态计数在低维观测下表现最好,但高维RGB图像下性能大幅下降
  • 最大熵方法虽非最优但最鲁棒,而技能多样性方法不提升探索效率

强化学习在稀疏奖励环境中面临困难探索问题。已有多种内在奖励被提出以促进多样性探索,涵盖状态、策略和技能三个层面。然而,不同层次多样性对智能体行为的影响尚不明确。本文在MiniGrid环境中,选取四种内在奖励(状态计数、内在好奇心模块ICM、最大熵、多样即一切DIAYN),通过评估回合回报、观察覆盖度、位置覆盖度、策略熵及到达稀疏奖励的时间等指标,系统比较其探索效果。结果表明:在低维观测下,状态计数表现最佳;但在RGB图像输入下,其性能显著下降,主要受表征学习挑战影响。相反,最大熵方法受环境维度影响较小,展现出更强鲁棒性,尽管并非总是最优。此外,尽管DIAYN能学习多样化技能并提升泛化能力,但在本任务中并未有效促进探索,原因在于:一是技能空间学习本身困难,二是技能内探索侧重行为区分而非均匀访问状态。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

One of the open challenges in Reinforcement Learning is the hard exploration problem in sparse reward environments. Various types of intrinsic rewards have been proposed to address this challenge by pushing towards diversity. This diversity might be imposed at different levels, favouring the agent to explore different states, policies or behaviours (State, Policy and Skill level diversity, respectively). However, the impact of diversity on the agent's behaviour remains unclear. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by studying the effect of different levels of diversity imposed by intrinsic rewards on the exploration patterns of RL agents. We select four intrinsic rewards (State Count, Intrinsic Curiosity Module (ICM), Maximum Entropy, and Diversity is all you need (DIAYN)), each pushing for a different diversity level. We conduct an empirical study on MiniGrid environment to compare their impact on exploration considering various metrics related to the agent's exploration, namely: episodic return, observation coverage, agent's position coverage, policy entropy, and timeframes to reach the sparse reward. The main outcome of the study is that State Count leads to the best exploration performance in the case of low-dimensional observations. However, in the case of RGB observations, the performance of State Count is highly degraded mostly due to representation learning challenges. Conversely, Maximum Entropy is less impacted, resulting in a more robust exploration, despite being not always optimal. Lastly, our empirical study revealed that learning diverse skills with DIAYN, often linked to improved robustness and generalisation, does not promote exploration in MiniGrid environments. This is because: i) learning the skill space itself can be challenging, and ii) exploration within the skill space prioritises differentiating between behaviours rather than achieving uniform state visitation.

强化学习探索策略内在奖励多样性

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