arXiv:2508.13922cs.LGcs.AI2025-08中稿 · IEEE SMC, 2025被引 1

用类别分布实现多模态策略,提升连续控制中的探索效率。

Categorical Policies: Multimodal Policy Learning and Exploration in Continuous Control

  • 引入类别分布作为中间结构,实现多模式行为选择。
  • 在DeepMind Control Suite上收敛更快,优于传统高斯策略。
  • 适合需要复杂探索的连续控制任务,如机器人操控。

深度强化学习中的策略通常仅用高斯分布参数化,导致行为模式单一。然而,许多实际决策问题需要多模态策略以增强环境探索能力,从而应对稀疏奖励、复杂动态或上下文变化。在连续控制任务中,传统方法通过添加高斯噪声或采样随机策略进行探索,但局限于最优动作附近。本文提出类别策略(Categorical Policies),利用中间类别分布选择行为模式,并生成条件动作。采用两种可微分的采样方案,在保持梯度优化效率的同时实现离散潜在结构。实验在DeepMind Control Suite上验证,所提方法通过更优探索实现更快收敛,性能超越标准高斯策略。结果表明,类别分布是连续控制中结构化探索与多模态行为表示的有效工具。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

A policy in deep reinforcement learning (RL), either deterministic or stochastic, is commonly parameterized as a Gaussian distribution alone, limiting the learned behavior to be unimodal. However, the nature of many practical decision-making problems favors a multimodal policy that facilitates robust exploration of the environment and thus to address learning challenges arising from sparse rewards, complex dynamics, or the need for strategic adaptation to varying contexts. This issue is exacerbated in continuous control domains where exploration usually takes place in the vicinity of the predicted optimal action, either through an additive Gaussian noise or the sampling process of a stochastic policy. In this paper, we introduce Categorical Policies to model multimodal behavior modes with an intermediate categorical distribution, and then generate output action that is conditioned on the sampled mode. We explore two sampling schemes that ensure differentiable discrete latent structure while maintaining efficient gradient-based optimization. By utilizing a latent categorical distribution to select the behavior mode, our approach naturally expresses multimodality while remaining fully differentiable via the sampling tricks. We evaluate our multimodal policy on a set of DeepMind Control Suite environments, demonstrating that through better exploration, our learned policies converge faster and outperform standard Gaussian policies. Our results indicate that the Categorical distribution serves as a powerful tool for structured exploration and multimodal behavior representation in continuous control.

强化学习多模态策略连续控制

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