改进PPO算法,让策略更新更少走偏方向,提升训练稳定性。
Directional-Clamp PPO
- 引入方向性钳制机制,惩罚偏离正确优化方向的策略更新。
- 在多种MuJoCo环境中,性能超越原始PPO及多数变体。
- 适合追求稳定强化学习训练的科研与工程人员使用。
近端策略优化(PPO)是深度强化学习中最为成功的算法之一,因其鲁棒性和广泛适用性而受到青睐。标准PPO通过重要性采样比率向‘正确’方向调整——对正优势动作提高比率,负优势动作降低比率,并用裁剪函数防止过度优化。然而,由于回溯过程的随机性和策略优化的随机性,我们发现实际优化中比率经常进入‘错误’方向,这成为阻碍PPO性能提升的关键因素,却长期被忽视。为此,本文提出方向性钳制PPO(DClamp-PPO),对进入严格‘错误’方向的样本施加更强惩罚:当优势为正但比率低于1-β,或优势为负但比率高于1+β(β∈(0,1))时,强制增大损失梯度斜率。理论与实验均表明,该方法能更有效避免错误方向更新,使比率更贴近1,且在多个MuJoCo环境、不同随机种子下一致优于原始PPO及其变体。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely regarded as one of the most successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, known for its robustness and effectiveness across a range of problems. The PPO objective encourages the importance ratio between the current and behavior policies to move to the "right" direction -- starting from importance sampling ratios equal to 1, increasing the ratios for actions with positive advantages and decreasing those with negative advantages. A clipping function is introduced to prevent over-optimization when updating the importance ratio in these "right" direction regions. Many PPO variants have been proposed to extend its success, most of which modify the objective's behavior by altering the clipping in the "right" direction regions. However, due to randomness in the rollouts and stochasticity of the policy optimization, we observe that the ratios frequently move to the "wrong" direction during the PPO optimization. This is a key factor hindering the improvement of PPO, but it has been largely overlooked. To address this, we propose the Directional-Clamp PPO algorithm (DClamp-PPO), which further penalizes the actions going to the strict "wrong" direction regions, where the advantage is positive (negative) and importance ratio falls below (above) $1 - β$ ($1+β$), for a tunable parameter $β\in (0, 1)$. The penalty is by enforcing a steeper loss slope, i.e., a clamp, in those regions. We demonstrate that DClamp-PPO consistently outperforms PPO, as well as its variants, by focusing on modifying the objective's behavior in the "right" direction, across various MuJoCo environments, using different random seeds. The proposed method is shown, both theoretically and empirically, to better avoid "wrong" direction updates while keeping the importance ratio closer to 1.
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