arXiv:2506.13690cs.LGcs.AI2025-06NeurIPS

通过元学习动作相似性,优化宏观动作的信用分配,提升强化学习探索效率。

Meta-learning how to Share Credit among Macro-Actions

  • 用元学习构建动作相似矩阵,降低动作空间有效维度。
  • 在Atari和StreetFighter II上超越Rainbow-DQN基线,显著提升探索效果。
  • 相似结构可迁移至相关环境,适用于需要高效探索的RL任务。

强化学习中引入宏观动作可改善探索,但盲目添加反而导致效果下降。本文指出问题根源在于宏观动作增加动作空间规模,使传统探索策略失效。为此,提出一种新型正则化项,通过联合元学习动作与宏观动作间的相似矩阵,降低动作空间的有效维度,从而优化信用分配。该方法在Atari游戏及StreetFighter II环境中验证,均显著优于Rainbow-DQN基线。结果还显示,学习到的宏观动作相似性具备跨环境迁移能力。本工作为利用动作空间几何结构提升信用分配与探索效率提供了新思路。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

One proposed mechanism to improve exploration in reinforcement learning is through the use of macro-actions. Paradoxically though, in many scenarios the naive addition of macro-actions does not lead to better exploration, but rather the opposite. It has been argued that this was caused by adding non-useful macros and multiple works have focused on mechanisms to discover effectively environment-specific useful macros. In this work, we take a slightly different perspective. We argue that the difficulty stems from the trade-offs between reducing the average number of decisions per episode versus increasing the size of the action space. Namely, one typically treats each potential macro-action as independent and atomic, hence strictly increasing the search space and making typical exploration strategies inefficient. To address this problem we propose a novel regularization term that exploits the relationship between actions and macro-actions to improve the credit assignment mechanism by reducing the effective dimension of the action space and, therefore, improving exploration. The term relies on a similarity matrix that is meta-learned jointly with learning the desired policy. We empirically validate our strategy looking at macro-actions in Atari games, and the StreetFighter II environment. Our results show significant improvements over the Rainbow-DQN baseline in all environments. Additionally, we show that the macro-action similarity is transferable to related environments. We believe this work is a small but important step towards understanding how the similarity-imposed geometry on the action space can be exploited to improve credit assignment and exploration, therefore making learning more effective.

强化学习信用分配元学习探索

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