arXiv:2603.20521cs.LGcs.AI2026-03

用惊喜度筛选更新,让分布式强化学习更稳更快

Delightful Distributed Policy Gradient

  • 按惊喜度与优势乘积动态过滤更新,区分失败与罕见成功
  • 在模拟延迟任务中,误差比传统方法低近10倍,且随任务复杂度提升
  • 适合处理带延迟、错误或奖励污染的分布式强化学习场景

分布式强化学习常因过时、出错或不匹配的执行者产生高意外性动作(即负对数概率高)。核心问题不是意外数据本身,而是从意外数据中进行负向学习。高意外性失败会通过大垂直分量主导有限批次更新,而高意外性成功则揭示了当前策略可能错过的机遇。本文提出的「愉悦政策梯度」(Delightful Policy Gradient, DG)通过愉悦度(优势与意外性的乘积)对每次更新进行门控,抑制罕见失败并保留罕见成功,无需依赖行为概率。表格分析显示,随着学习器性能提升,DG可将高意外性失败的垂直方差分量抑制至与策略重叠度成比例。优势符号对基于意外性的过滤至关重要:仅依赖学习器概率的门控会同时抑制罕见成功。在含模拟延迟的MNIST任务中,无离策略修正的DG优于使用精确行为概率的重要度加权PG。在带有延迟、执行者故障、奖励污染和稀有发现的Transformer序列任务中,DG经常实现近10倍的误差降低。当四类干扰同时存在时,其样本效率优势达数量级,并随任务复杂度增长。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Distributed reinforcement learning trains on data from stale, buggy, or mismatched actors, producing actions with high surprisal (negative log-probability) under the learner's policy. The core difficulty is not surprising data per se, but \emph{negative learning from surprising data}. High-surprisal failures can dominate finite-batch updates through large perpendicular components, while high-surprisal successes reveal opportunities the current policy would otherwise miss. The \textit{Delightful Policy Gradient} (DG) separates these cases by gating each update with delight, the product of advantage and surprisal, suppressing rare failures and preserving rare successes without behavior probabilities. In a tabular analysis, DG suppresses the perpendicular second moment of high-surprisal failures by a policy-overlap factor that vanishes as the learner improves. The advantage sign is essential for surprisal-based filtering: any learner-probability-only gate that suppresses rare failures also suppresses rare successes. On MNIST with simulated staleness, DG without off-policy correction outperforms importance-weighted PG with exact behavior probabilities. On a transformer sequence task with staleness, actor bugs, reward corruption, and rare discovery, DG often achieves nearly order-of-magnitude lower error. When all four frictions act simultaneously, its sample-efficiency advantage is order-of-magnitude and grows with task complexity.

强化学习分布式策略梯度鲁棒性

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