决策变换器比传统离线强化学习更适应稀疏奖励环境。
A Comparison Between Decision Transformers and Traditional Offline Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
- 将离线强化学习视为序列建模问题,用决策变换器处理策略学习。
- 在稀疏奖励下,决策变换器在中等专家数据上表现最优,方差更低。
- 适合奖励结构不确定或数据质量混杂的场景,但计算开销大。
离线强化学习旨在不与环境交互的情况下,从预收集的数据集中学习有效策略。尽管传统的离线RL算法如保守Q学习(CQL)和隐式Q学习(IQL)已展现潜力,但在不同奖励密度环境下常面临探索与利用的平衡难题。最近提出的决策变换器(DT)将离线RL重定义为序列建模问题,在多个基准测试中表现优异。本文通过在连续控制环境ANT中对比DT与传统离线RL算法在密集与稀疏奖励设置下的表现,研究其在不同奖励结构下的策略学习能力与泛化性能。实验表明,DT对奖励密度变化不敏感,尤其在稀疏奖励场景中使用中等专家数据时表现突出;而基于价值的传统方法如IQL在高质量密集奖励数据下表现更优,CQL则在不同数据质量下保持均衡表现。此外,DT性能方差较低,但计算资源消耗显著高于传统方法。结果表明,序列建模方法更适合奖励结构不确定或数据质量参差的场景,而基于价值的方法在密集奖励与高质量示范下仍具竞争力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The field of Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to derive effective policies from pre-collected datasets without active environment interaction. While traditional offline RL algorithms like Conservative Q-Learning (CQL) and Implicit Q-Learning (IQL) have shown promise, they often face challenges in balancing exploration and exploitation, especially in environments with varying reward densities. The recently proposed Decision Transformer (DT) approach, which reframes offline RL as a sequence modelling problem, has demonstrated impressive results across various benchmarks. This paper presents a comparative study evaluating the performance of DT against traditional offline RL algorithms in dense and sparse reward settings for the ANT continous control environment. Our research investigates how these algorithms perform when faced with different reward structures, examining their ability to learn effective policies and generalize across varying levels of feedback. Through empirical analysis in the ANT environment, we found that DTs showed less sensitivity to varying reward density compared to other methods and particularly excelled with medium-expert datasets in sparse reward scenarios. In contrast, traditional value-based methods like IQL showed improved performance in dense reward settings with high-quality data, while CQL offered balanced performance across different data qualities. Additionally, DTs exhibited lower variance in performance but required significantly more computational resources compared to traditional approaches. These findings suggest that sequence modelling approaches may be more suitable for scenarios with uncertain reward structures or mixed-quality data, while value-based methods remain competitive in settings with dense rewards and high-quality demonstrations.
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。