arXiv:2608.26481cs.LG2026-08

共享评论家会因环境差异导致学习偏差,加个环境索引就能解决。

Shared Actors Need Not Share Critics: Effects of Value Mismatch in Parallel Reinforcement Learning

论文配图:Shared Actors Need Not Share Critics: Effects of Value Mismatch in Parallel Reinforcement Learning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 让评论家知道当前环境编号,区分不同环境的价值目标。
  • 在Procgen游戏上,新方法使平均收益提升40.8%。
  • 适合多环境并行训练的强化学习场景,尤其关注稳定性问题。

当单一策略在多个相同任务的环境中并行训练时(如程序生成关卡、随机动力学或课程设置),通常使用统一的评论家。然而不同环境对同一输入可能赋予不同的期望回报,缺乏环境信息的评论家必须调和不同的价值目标,从而系统性地改变各环境内的优势估计。通过具有多个环境和共同最优动作的示例性老虎机模型,我们揭示了这种价值不匹配如何重新分配策略更新,强化无益行为并削弱甚至反转有益行为。尽管使用无基准、共享值或环境专属值的代理在固定策略下均具有相同的平均对数更新且收敛至同一最优策略,但其实际学习路径差异显著。该分析提出最小干预:仅向评论家提供已记录的环境索引,使其能分离价值目标。受控的CartPole与MuJoCo实验验证了预测的价值偏移、优势变化及性能差距;在更复杂的BipedalWalker与Procgen设置中,同一干预显著提升了学习稳定性与回报。在全部16个Procgen游戏中,多头条件评论家在每游戏600个未见关卡上,将总归一化收益提高40.8%。结论表明,价值不匹配是评论家共享破坏随机学习动态的直接机制,该机制无法仅由标量估计方差捕捉,而条件化索引在并行强化学习中普遍有效。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

When a single policy is trained in parallel across multiple environments of the same task, such as procedurally generated levels, randomized dynamics, or curricula, implementations commonly use one critic across all sampled environments. Yet different environments can assign different expected returns to the same input visible to the critic. A critic without environment information must then reconcile distinct value targets, systematically shifting the sampled advantages within individual environments. Using illustrative bandit models with multiple environments and a common optimal arm, we characterize how this value mismatch redistributes sampled policy updates, reinforcing unhelpful actions while attenuating or even reversing useful ones. The oracle processes using no baseline, the shared value, or the value specific to the sampled environment have the same mean logit update at a fixed policy and converge to the same optimal policy, yet their realized learning paths can differ sharply. The analysis motivates a minimal intervention: give only a logged environment index to the critic so that it can separate the value targets. Controlled CartPole and MuJoCo experiments expose the predicted shifted values, advantages, and performance gaps. In the more complex BipedalWalker and Procgen settings, the same intervention yields more stable learning and higher returns. Across all $16$ Procgen games, the multihead conditional critic improves aggregate normalized return on $600$ unseen levels per game by $40.8\%$. In conclusion, the theory identifies value mismatch as a direct mechanism through which critic sharing can degrade stochastic learning dynamics, not captured by scalar estimator variance alone, and the experiments show that conditioning on an index is broadly effective in parallel reinforcement learning.

强化学习评论家共享价值偏差并行训练

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