提出新算法,让强化学习在稀疏奖励下更稳定。
Soft Deterministic Policy Gradient with Gaussian Smoothing

- 用高斯平滑重构贝尔曼方程,避免依赖动作梯度。
- 在离散奖励环境下性能显著优于标准DDPG。
- 适合奖励信号不连续或稀疏的强化学习任务。
确定性策略梯度(DPG)广泛用于连续控制,但其依赖批评者对动作的可微性,这在稀疏或离散奖励的实际问题中常被破坏,导致策略梯度定义不清、学习不稳定。为此,我们提出一种基于高斯平滑的平滑贝尔曼方程的原理性替代方案。具体地,我们定义了一个新的动作值函数,并推导出软确定性策略梯度(Soft-DPG)。该公式无需显式依赖批评者对动作的梯度,即使对于非光滑的Q函数也能保证梯度良好定义。我们将该框架实现为深度强化学习算法,称为软深度确定性策略梯度(Soft DDPG)。在标准连续控制基准及其离散奖励变体上的实证评估表明,Soft DDPG在密集奖励环境中保持竞争力,并在多数离散奖励环境中表现明显优于标准DDPG,尤其在标准DDPG对不规则批评者景观敏感的情况下优势显著。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deterministic policy gradient (DPG) is widely utilized for continuous control; however, it inherently relies on the differentiability of the critic with respect to the action during policy updates. This assumption is violated in practical control problems involving sparse or discrete rewards, leading to ill-defined policy gradients and unstable learning. To address these challenges, we propose a principled alternative based on a smoothed Bellman equation formulated via Gaussian smoothing. Specifically, we define a novel action-value function based on a smoothed Bellman equation and derive the soft deterministic policy gradient (Soft-DPG). Our formulation eliminates explicit dependence on critic action-gradients and ensures that the gradient remains well-defined even for non-smooth Q-functions. We instantiate this framework into a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which we call soft deep deterministic policy gradient (Soft DDPG). Empirical evaluations on standard continuous control benchmarks and their discretized-reward variants show that Soft DDPG remains competitive in dense-reward settings and provides clear gains in most discretized-reward environments, where standard DDPG is more sensitive to irregular critic landscapes.
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