动态学习价值函数的支撑区间,让强化学习更稳定高效。
Learning the Supports for Categorical Critic in Reinforcement Learning
- 用可学习的上下界替代固定支撑区间,提升适应性。
- 理论证明新目标能更好逼近真实贝尔曼误差。
- 无需预设区间,在连续控制任务中表现更优。
价值函数是基于演员-评论家的深度强化学习中的核心组件。传统方法通过最小化均方误差(MSE)将价值函数训练为回归任务,而分布式强化学习则基于分布贝尔曼算子建模回报分布。本文研究了高斯直方图损失(HL-Gauss),一种将价值估计重构为分类问题的方法,将每个标量贝尔曼目标编码为高斯平滑的类别目标。尽管该方法有潜力,但将其应用于强化学习存在固有挑战,尤其是需要预先定义固定的支撑区间,而这常因目标值的非平稳性和随机性而变得复杂。本文提出一种动态学习支撑区间的方案,不再提前设定上下界。我们推导出一个联合学习上下界与标量值类别表示的目标函数,并证明该目标构成均方贝尔曼误差的上界。理论分析进一步表明,该上界比固定支撑的HL-Gauss更紧。实验结果表明,所提方法能稳定自适应支撑区间,在多数连续控制任务中达到与基于HL-Gauss的演员-评论家算法相当的性能,且在部分任务上表现更优,同时无需预设支撑区间。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Value functions are an essential component in actor-critic based deep reinforcement learning (RL). Conventionally, these functions are trained as a regression task by minimising the mean squared error (MSE) relative to bootstrapped target values. Meanwhile, in distributional RL, a distribution of returns is modelled based on the distributional Bellman operator. This work investigates the Gaussian Histogram Loss (HL-Gauss), a recent approach that reframes value estimation as classification by encoding each scalar Bellman target as a Gaussian-smoothed categorical target. Despite its potential, applying histogram-based losses to RL presents inherent challenges, most notably the requirement to pre-define a fixed support interval, which is often complicated by the non-stationary and stochastic nature of target values typically found in RL tasks. In this work, we propose an approach that dynamically learns the lower and upper bounds of the support instead of assigning them beforehand. We derive an objective that jointly learns these bounds whilst learning the categorical representation of the scalar values, and we show that this objective forms an upper bound on the mean-squared Bellman error. Our theoretical analysis further shows that this bound is tighter than that of non-learned supports of HL-Gauss. Empirically, the proposed objective enables stable adaptation of the support interval and matches HL-Gauss-based actor-critic algorithms on most continuous-control tasks whilst improving on a subset, without requiring a pre-specified support interval.
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