随机丢弃25%经验过渡,让PPO训练更稳定
Not All Transitions Matter: Evidence from PPO

- 随机丢弃部分状态转移,打破梯度重复性
- 保留25%过渡时,性能持平且训练更稳定
- 无需改算法,适配所有PPO实现
在PPO等on-policy强化学习中,经验序列因动作因果链导致连续转移高度相关,梯度信号重复严重,隐藏着训练不稳定性。本文发现:仅在合适阶段随机丢弃固定比例的转移(如25%),即可有效破坏重复梯度结构,显著改善训练动态。该方法无需新增组件、不修改核心算法,仅需一次采样步骤,适用于任意PPO实现。在CartPole-v1、Acrobot-v1、LunarLander-v2、HalfCheetah-v5和Hopper-v5五项任务上,该策略在奖励表现上与原始PPO相当,同时在KL散度、策略熵和价值估计上展现出更一致的训练过程。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Training a reinforcement learning agent on-policy means collecting fresh experience at every update, and that experience comes with a hidden problem. Each state in a rollout is the direct output of the previous one, causally chained together by the agent's own actions. Because of this, consecutive transitions are never truly independent. They carry overlapping information, and the gradient signal the network receives ends up far more repetitive than the batch size suggests. The same directions get reinforced over and over, the value network struggles to keep up as the policy shifts, and training becomes quietly unstable in ways that reward curves alone rarely reveal. This paper asks whether that redundancy can simply be removed. We show that randomly dropping a fixed fraction of transitions from the rollout, at the right stage so the reward signal stays intact, is enough to break the repetitive gradient structure and stabilize training. The change is minimal: one sampling step, no new components, no modification to the core algorithm, and it works with any PPO implementation. Across five environments of increasing difficulty, CartPole-v1, Acrobot-v1, LunarLander-v2, HalfCheetah-v5, and Hopper-v5, the method matches vanilla PPO on reward while producing more consistent training dynamics across KL divergence, policy entropy, and value estimates. Dropping 25% of transitions turns out to be the sweet spot: enough to disrupt the redundancy, not enough to thin the batch.
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