arXiv:2503.14554cs.ROcs.AI2025-03

异步强化学习让机器人决策更快,实测性能更优。

Synchronous vs Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning in a Real World Robot

  • 将决策与梯度更新分离,实现异步学习
  • 异步方法学习更快,获得的累计回报显著更高
  • 响应速度快的模型表现更好,即使更新次数少

近年来,基于物理机器人的强化学习吸引了广泛研究关注。然而,当前先进算法未考虑真实环境不会等待智能体决策或更新的事实。传统同步强化学习通过周期性执行计算开销大的梯度更新来学习,导致智能体响应延迟增加。在动态变化环境中,这种延迟可能严重影响学习性能。异步强化学习通过分离决策与梯度更新计算,有望缓解此问题。但针对物理机器人的同步与异步强化学习对比研究仍较少,其实际性能优势尚不明确。本研究使用Franka Emika Panda机械臂进行实验,结果表明:采用异步强化学习的智能体学习速度更快,获得的累计回报显著更高。实验还显示,在相同条件下,响应时间更短的智能体表现优于响应慢但更新次数更多的智能体。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

In recent times, reinforcement learning (RL) with physical robots has attracted the attention of a wide range of researchers. However, state-of-the-art RL algorithms do not consider that physical environments do not wait for the RL agent to make decisions or updates. RL agents learn by periodically conducting computationally expensive gradient updates. When decision-making and gradient update tasks are carried out sequentially by the RL agent in a physical robot, it significantly increases the agent's response time. In a rapidly changing environment, this increased response time may be detrimental to the performance of the learning agent. Asynchronous RL methods, which separate the computation of decision-making and gradient updates, are a potential solution to this problem. However, only a few comparisons between asynchronous and synchronous RL have been made with physical robots. For this reason, the exact performance benefits of using asynchronous RL methods over synchronous RL methods are still unclear. In this study, we provide a performance comparison between asynchronous and synchronous RL using a physical robotic arm called Franka Emika Panda. Our experiments show that the agents learn faster and attain significantly more returns using asynchronous RL. Our experiments also demonstrate that the learning agent with a faster response time performs better than the agent with a slower response time, even if the agent with a slower response time performs a higher number of gradient updates.

强化学习机器人异步学习

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