不预训练Q函数也能高效微调,新方法提升性能26%。
Do You Really Need to Pretrain Q-Functions for Online RL Fine-Tuning?

- 用多策略集成数据初始化Q函数,避免预训练偏差
- 在连续控制任务中,性能比随机初始化高26%
- 适合追求高效在线强化学习的算法研究者
预训练后微调已成为高性能策略学习的主流范式。在基于价值的强化学习中,一个关键问题是:在已有预训练策略的前提下,是否还需对Q函数进行离线数据预训练?传统观点认为需要,但近期研究表明,使用随机初始化的Q函数进行在线强化学习,仍可获得高性能且可靠的策略。本文系统研究了在预训练策略基础上微调时,预训练Q函数的实际作用。结果出人意料:简单预训练往往对性能提升有限。根本原因在于:预训练阶段学习的Q函数针对的是预训练策略,而非在线微调最终收敛的Q函数,这一差距即使经过离线价值最大化也无法消除。为此,我们提出初始化策略集成(IPE)方法,通过训练多个多样化策略并聚合其轨迹来引导在线学习中的Q函数初始化。在一系列具有挑战性的连续控制基准测试中,IPE相比朴素预训练方法平均提升1.26倍性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Pre-training followed by fine-tuning has become the dominant recipe for learning performant policies, and in value-based reinforcement learning (RL) this raises a natural question: given a pretrained policy, should the Q-function be pretrained on offline data too? Conventional wisdom suggests it should, but recent results show that online RL with a randomly-initialized Q-function can result in highly performant and reliable policies without needing to pretrain the Q-function. In this paper, we systematically study whether pretraining the Q-function actually helps when fine-tuning on top of a pretrained base policy. We find, surprisingly, that naive Q-function pretraining often provides little benefit over random initialization. We show this stems from a fundamental mismatch: the Q-function learned during pretraining targets the pretrained policy's Q-function, not the Q-function that online fine-tuning converges to, and this gap persists even after offline value maximization. Motivated by this finding, we propose Initialization via Policy Ensemble (IPE), a simple method that trains multiple diverse policies and uses their pooled rollouts to bootstrap the Q-function learning in online RL. Across a suite of challenging continuous control benchmarks, IPE yields an average 1.26x improvement in fine-tuning performance over naive Q-function pre-training.
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