提出轨迹熵约束强化学习,解决探索与利用的稳定性问题。
Mind Your Entropy: From Maximum Entropy to Trajectory Entropy-Constrained RL
- 分离奖励与熵的Q函数,避免温度更新干扰价值估计
- 通过累积熵约束控制策略长期随机性,提升性能与稳定性
- 新算法DSAC-E在多个环境上表现更优,适合需要稳定探索的场景
最大熵已成为主流的离线强化学习框架,用于平衡利用与探索。但仍有两大瓶颈限制性能提升:(1)熵与温度参数联合更新导致Q值估计非平稳;(2)仅基于单步熵进行局部调参,未考虑累积熵的长期影响。本文提出轨迹熵约束强化学习(TECRL)框架,首先分别学习奖励和熵相关的两个Q函数,确保价值目标不受温度更新干扰;其次,通过专用熵Q函数显式量化预期累积熵,实现轨迹熵约束,从而控制策略的长期随机性。在此框架基础上,我们扩展最先进的分布软演员-评论家算法,提出三重改进的实用离线算法DSAC-E。在OpenAI Gym基准测试中,DSAC-E实现了更高回报与更好稳定性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Maximum entropy has become a mainstream off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) framework for balancing exploitation and exploration. However, two bottlenecks still limit further performance improvement: (1) non-stationary Q-value estimation caused by jointly injecting entropy and updating its weighting parameter, i.e., temperature; and (2) short-sighted local entropy tuning that adjusts temperature only according to the current single-step entropy, without considering the effect of cumulative entropy over time. In this paper, we extends maximum entropy framework by proposing a trajectory entropy-constrained reinforcement learning (TECRL) framework to address these two challenges. Within this framework, we first separately learn two Q-functions, one associated with reward and the other with entropy, ensuring clean and stable value targets unaffected by temperature updates. Then, the dedicated entropy Q-function, explicitly quantifying the expected cumulative entropy, enables us to enforce a trajectory entropy constraint and consequently control the policy long-term stochasticity. Building on this TECRL framework, we develop a practical off-policy algorithm, DSAC-E, by extending the state-of-the-art distributional soft actor-critic with three refinements (DSAC-T). Empirical results on the OpenAI Gym benchmark demonstrate that our DSAC-E can achieve higher returns and better stability.
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