用搜索思想选子目标,让智能体更高效探索稀疏奖励环境。
Search Inspired Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
- 基于学习进度在已知状态边界选子目标,引导探索方向。
- 在复杂稀疏奖励任务中达成率超主流基线,且能到达任意状态。
- 适合需要高效探索的强化学习场景,尤其适用于未知环境。
稀疏奖励环境中的探索仍是强化学习的核心挑战。现有方法如课程学习和Go-Explore依赖人工设计启发式规则,而好奇心驱动方法易陷入次优策略。本文提出一种受搜索启发的探索方法(SIERL),通过根据智能体学习进展主动设定子目标来引导探索。每个回合开始时,SIERL从已知状态空间的边界(即前沿)中选取一个子目标,之后智能体继续向主任务目标探索。其关键贡献在于子目标选择机制,能提供既非过度熟悉也非完全陌生的状态-动作对,从而系统性扩展前沿,并确保智能体可抵达前沿内任意状态。受搜索算法启发,子目标按到达成本与剩余成本估计进行优先排序,有效引导探索至信息量最高的区域。在多个具有挑战性的稀疏奖励环境中,SIERL在达成主任务目标和泛化至环境中任意状态方面均优于主流基线方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven methods risk converging to suboptimal policies. We propose Search-Inspired Exploration in Reinforcement Learning (SIERL), a novel method that actively guides exploration by setting sub-goals based on the agent's learning progress. At the beginning of each episode, SIERL chooses a sub-goal from the \textit{frontier} (the boundary of the agent's known state space), before the agent continues exploring toward the main task objective. The key contribution of our method is the sub-goal selection mechanism, which provides state-action pairs that are neither overly familiar nor completely novel. Thus, it assures that the frontier is expanded systematically and that the agent is capable of reaching any state within it. Inspired by search, sub-goals are prioritized from the frontier based on estimates of cost-to-come and cost-to-go, effectively steering exploration towards the most informative regions. In experiments on challenging sparse-reward environments, SIERL outperforms dominant baselines in both achieving the main task goal and generalizing to reach arbitrary states in the environment.
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