用简易模型辅助训练Transformer,让强化学习更稳定高效。
Accelerating Transformers in Online RL
- 先用简易模型行为克隆训练Transformer,再在线更新
- 图像环境训练时间减半,缓冲区大小缩小至1-2万
- 适合追求高效稳定训练的机器人强化学习研究者
Transformer在强化学习中的应用拓展了机器人任务的可能性,但其在无模型在线RL中存在实现难题,尤其因模型不稳定性导致部分算法难以部署。本文提出一种两阶段算法:第一阶段,通过行为克隆,由更简单稳定的加速器策略独立与环境交互并训练Transformer;第二阶段,预训练的Transformer进入完全在线设置。实验表明,该方法不仅使Transformer稳定训练,还在基于状态和图像的ManiSkill环境以及MuJoCo的MDP/POMDP任务中,将图像环境训练时间减少一半,同时将离线策略方法所需的重放缓冲区规模降至10,000–20,000,显著降低计算开销。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The appearance of transformer-based models in Reinforcement Learning (RL) has expanded the horizons of possibilities in robotics tasks, but it has simultaneously brought a wide range of challenges during its implementation, especially in model-free online RL. Some of the existing learning algorithms cannot be easily implemented with transformer-based models due to the instability of the latter. In this paper, we propose a method that uses the Accelerator policy as a transformer's trainer. The Accelerator, a simpler and more stable model, interacts with the environment independently while simultaneously training the transformer through behavior cloning during the first stage of the proposed algorithm. In the second stage, the pretrained transformer starts to interact with the environment in a fully online setting. As a result, this model-free algorithm accelerates the transformer in terms of its performance and helps it to train online in a more stable and faster way. By conducting experiments on both state-based and image-based ManiSkill environments, as well as on MuJoCo tasks in MDP and POMDP settings, we show that applying our algorithm not only enables stable training of transformers but also reduces training time on image-based environments by up to a factor of two. Moreover, it decreases the required replay buffer size in off-policy methods to 10-20 thousand, which significantly lowers the overall computational demands.
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。