用已有策略提升强化学习训练效率,让新策略更快更强。
An Agency-Transferring Model-Free Policy Enhancement Technique

- 用仲裁机制逐步替换旧策略,实现能力迁移。
- 训练初期即达高成功率,最终独立运行仍表现优异。
- 适合已有基础策略但需优化的场景,如机器人控制。
从零训练强化学习策略成本高昂:需精心设计奖励函数与环境,进行大量调参并消耗大量算力。然而许多控制问题已有可运行但次优的基线策略。本文提出一种将该基线嵌入训练过程的方法,在提升训练效率的同时,生成性能超越基线的策略。在每一步中,方法在基线策略与可训练学习策略间进行仲裁,初期高度依赖基线,随后逐步将决策权转移给学习策略。训练结束时,学习策略为独立神经网络,无需基线支持即可运行。论文形式化定义了基线策略“可用”的条件:在此策略下,智能体以高概率抵达目标集并保持停留。所提仲裁机制利用此性质,在训练初期即实现高目标达成率。理论分析在假设条件下解释该行为,并扩展至最终无基线状态,推导出独立学习策略的目标达成概率下界。连续控制基准测试结果表明,该方法收益与先进方法相当或更优,且在整个训练过程中保持最高目标达成率——包括最终阶段(学习策略完全独立运行时)。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies from scratch is costly: it requires careful reward and environment design, extensive tuning, and substantial computation. Yet many control problems already have a functional but suboptimal policy available as a baseline. This paper proposes a method for embedding such a baseline into the RL training process, simultaneously improving training efficiency relative to from-scratch methods and producing a learning policy that outperforms the baseline. At each step, the method arbitrates between the baseline policy and a trainable learning policy, initially relying strongly on the baseline policy and then progressively transferring agency to the learning policy. By the end of training, the learning policy is a standalone neural network that operates without baseline policy support. The paper formalizes what it means for the baseline policy to be functional: under this policy, the agent reaches a goal set and remains there with high probability. The proposed arbitration mechanism is designed to exploit this property during training, yielding high goal-reaching rates right from the beginning of training. A theoretical analysis provides a formal interpretation of this behavior under stated assumptions and extends it to the final baseline-free regime, where explicit lower bounds are derived for the goal-reaching probability of the standalone learning policy. Empirical results on continuous-control benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves returns that match or exceed those of competitive approaches, while maintaining the highest goal-reaching rates throughout training among the compared methods -- including in the final stage, where the learning policy operates without any baseline support.
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