破解离散版SAC性能差的根源,提出更稳健的强化学习框架
Dissecting Discrete Soft Actor-Critic: Limitations and Principled Alternatives
- 解耦策略与价值函数的熵,突破传统离散SAC瓶颈
- 新框架在Atari游戏上无需额外探索机制仍表现稳定
- 理论保证收敛性,适用于多种贝尔曼算子阶数
尽管软演员-评论家(SAC)在连续控制中表现优异,但其离散版本(DSAC)在挑战性离散动作领域(如Atari)表现不佳。本文从DSAC出发,重新审视该设置下的演员-评论家方法设计。首先发现,策略与评论家熵之间的耦合是导致DSAC性能差的主要原因。通过仅解耦这两者,DSAC性能显著提升。受此启发,我们提出一个灵活的离线策略演员-评论家框架,包含DSAC作为特例,并导出新的目标函数。该框架允许使用m步贝尔曼算子更新评论家,通过结合标准策略优化方法与熵正则化来实例化演员目标。理论上,证明了所提方法在表格设置下可保证收敛到最优正则化值函数,推广了先前工作结果。实验上,在标准Atari游戏中评估了所提目标函数。消融实验表明,与DSAC不同,这些目标(包括新目标)即使没有熵正则化或显式探索机制,也能保持鲁棒表现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is highly effective in continuous control, its discrete counterpart (DSAC) performs poorly on challenging discrete-action domains such as Atari. Consequently, starting from DSAC, we revisit the design of actor-critic methods in this setting. First, we determine that the coupling between the actor and critic entropy is the primary reason behind the poor performance of DSAC. We demonstrate that by merely decoupling these components, DSAC's performance significantly improves. Motivated by this insight, we introduce a flexible off-policy actor-critic framework that subsumes DSAC as a special case and yields novel objectives. Our framework allows using an m-step Bellman operator for the critic update, and instantiates the actor objective by combining standard policy optimization methods with entropy regularization. Theoretically, we prove that the proposed methods can guarantee convergence to the optimal regularized value function in the tabular setting, generalizing the results in prior work. Empirically, we evaluate the proposed objectives on standard Atari games. Our ablations indicate that, unlike DSAC, these objectives, including novel ones, perform robustly even without entropy regularization or explicit exploration mechanisms.
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