通过构建特定结构的激活层,让强化学习策略网络更快收敛到最优动作。
Imitate Optimal Policy: Prevail and Induce Action Collapse in Policy Gradient
- 在动作选择层引入预设的等角紧框架(ETF)作为目标结构。
- 实验显示新方法在多个环境中提升奖励并加速收敛。
- 适合希望提升离散动作强化学习效率的研究者和开发者。
强化学习中的策略梯度(PG)方法通常使用深度神经网络(DNN)学习共享的特征表示,用于动作选择层的概率计算。尽管已有大量研究关注策略网络的收敛性和全局最优性,但对其底层表征结构的分析仍较少。我们发现,在特定约束下训练最优策略时,会自然形成一种类似神经坍缩的现象,称为动作坍缩(Action Collapse, AC):1)具有相同最优动作的状态-动作激活趋于该动作的均值激活;2)相同最优动作的激活方差趋近于零;3)动作选择层权重与均值激活共同坍缩为等角紧框架(ETF)。由于最优策略DNN的塌缩ETF能最大化状态-动作空间中所有动作对之间的夹角,我们提出问题:能否将ETF结构作为动作选择层的固定目标?理论证明表明,以固定ETF为目标可自然诱导出AC。因此我们提出动作坍缩策略梯度(ACPG)方法,在动作选择层添加人工合成的ETF。该方法促使策略网络生成理想的配置,同时保持最优性。在多个OpenAI Gym环境上的实验表明,ACPG可无缝集成至任意离散PG方法,并实现更快速、更稳健的奖励提升。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Policy gradient (PG) methods in reinforcement learning frequently utilize deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn a shared backbone of feature representations used to compute likelihoods in an action selection layer. Numerous studies have been conducted on the convergence and global optima of policy networks, but few have analyzed representational structures of those underlying networks. While training an optimal policy DNN, we observed that under certain constraints, a gentle structure resembling neural collapse, which we refer to as Action Collapse (AC), emerges. This suggests that 1) the state-action activations (i.e. last-layer features) sharing the same optimal actions collapse towards those optimal actions respective mean activations; 2) the variability of activations sharing the same optimal actions converges to zero; 3) the weights of action selection layer and the mean activations collapse to a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF). Our early work showed those aforementioned constraints to be necessary for these observations. Since the collapsed ETF of optimal policy DNNs maximally separates the pair-wise angles of all actions in the state-action space, we naturally raise a question: can we learn an optimal policy using an ETF structure as a (fixed) target configuration in the action selection layer? Our analytical proof shows that learning activations with a fixed ETF as action selection layer naturally leads to the AC. We thus propose the Action Collapse Policy Gradient (ACPG) method, which accordingly affixes a synthetic ETF as our action selection layer. ACPG induces the policy DNN to produce such an ideal configuration in the action selection layer while remaining optimal. Our experiments across various OpenAI Gym environments demonstrate that our technique can be integrated into any discrete PG methods and lead to favorable reward improvements more quickly and robustly.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。