提出新算法,让强化学习更稳定且速度不输主流方法。
Gradient Iterated Temporal-Difference Learning
- 用梯度法优化迭代的贝尔曼算子,避免传统半梯度缺陷。
- 在雅达利游戏上达到与半梯度方法相当的学习速度。
- 适合追求稳定性与高效性的强化学习研究者使用。
时序差分(TD)学习在控制和评估智能体长期结果方面非常有效。现有方法多采用半梯度更新以加速学习,但忽略自举估计的梯度,易导致发散,如Baird反例所示。梯度TD方法虽可解决此问题,但因学习速度较慢未被广泛采用。近期提出的迭代TD学习通过并行学习一系列动作价值函数,使每一步优化前一步函数的贝尔曼算子应用,提升了速度。然而其半梯度特性仍带来不稳定性,因每个函数追踪的是动态目标。本文改进该方法,对这些动态目标计算梯度,构建出一种强大且高速的梯度TD算法——梯度迭代时序差分学习(Gradient Iterated Temporal-Difference Learning)。实验表明,该算法在多个基准测试中,包括雅达利游戏,学习速度与半梯度方法相当,这是此前所有梯度TD方法未能实现的结果。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Temporal-difference (TD) learning is highly effective at controlling and evaluating an agent's long-term outcomes. Most approaches in this paradigm implement a semi-gradient update to boost the learning speed, which consists of ignoring the gradient of the bootstrapped estimate. While popular, this type of update is prone to divergence, as Baird's counterexample illustrates. Gradient TD methods were introduced to overcome this issue, but have not been widely used, potentially due to issues with learning speed compared to semi-gradient methods. Recently, iterated TD learning was developed to increase the learning speed of TD methods. For that, it learns a sequence of action-value functions in parallel, where each function is optimized to represent the application of the Bellman operator over the previous function in the sequence. While promising, this algorithm can be unstable due to its semi-gradient nature, as each function tracks a moving target. In this work, we modify iterated TD learning by computing the gradients over those moving targets, aiming to build a powerful gradient TD method that competes with semi-gradient methods. Our evaluation reveals that this algorithm, called Gradient Iterated Temporal-Difference learning, has a competitive learning speed against semi-gradient methods across various benchmarks, including Atari games, a result that no prior work on gradient TD methods has demonstrated.
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