用有限记忆实现无误差的策略更新,让强化学习更稳定高效
StaQ: a Finite Memory Approach to Discrete Action Policy Mirror Descent
- 仅保留最近M个Q函数,实现近似但无误差的策略更新
- 实验表明增大M可提升性能,达到接近精确解的水平
- 适合追求稳定性和理论保障的强化学习研究者
在强化学习中,基于KL散度的正则化方法通过惩罚策略间的大幅变化,成为理论与实践中的常用手段。这类算法统称为策略镜面下降(PMD),具有平均化函数逼近器带来的评估误差的优点。然而,精确的PMD因需计算所有历史Q函数之和而难以实现。现有近似方法如自然策略梯度或演员-评论家可能引入更新误差。本文提出适用于离散动作空间的PMD类算法,仅在内存中保存最近M个Q函数。理论上证明:当M为有限且足够大时,可实现无更新误差的算法,同时保持PMD平均误差的优势。通过高效的GPU实现,在中等规模基准测试(如MinAtar)上验证:增加M能持续提升性能,达到接近精确PMD的效果,支持‘无限求和未必必要’的观点,表明保留最近M个Q函数是可行且理论严谨的PMD实现方式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization with a Kullback-Leibler divergence that penalizes large deviations between successive policies has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice. This family of algorithms, often referred to as Policy Mirror Descent (PMD), has the property of averaging out policy evaluation errors which are bound to occur when using function approximators. However, exact PMD has remained a mostly theoretical framework, as its closed-form solution involves the sum of all past Q-functions which is generally intractable. A common practical approximation of PMD is to follow the natural policy gradient or use actor-critic approaches, but this potentially introduces errors in the policy update. In this paper, we propose and analyze PMD-like algorithms for discrete action spaces that only keep the last $M$ Q-functions in memory. We show theoretically that for a finite and large enough $M$, an RL algorithm can be derived that introduces no errors from the policy update, yet keeps the desirable PMD property of averaging out policy evaluation errors. Using an efficient GPU implementation, we then show empirically on medium-scale RL benchmarks such as MinAtar that increasing $M$ improves performance up to a certain threshold after which the performance becomes close to that of exact PMD, reinforcing the theoretical findings that using an infinite sum might be unnecessary and that keeping in memory the last M Q-functions is a practical and theoretically grounded implementation of PMD.
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