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Register a new userUnbiased Deep Reinforcement Learning: A General Training Framework for Existing and Future Algorithms
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Huihui Zhang
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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In recent years deep neural networks have been successfully applied to the domains of reinforcement learning cite{bengio2009learning,krizhevsky2012imagenet,hinton2006reducing}. Deep reinforcement learning cite{mnih2015human} is reported to have the advantage of learning effective policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs over traditional agents. However, within the scope of the literature, there is no fundamental change or improvement on the existing training framework. Here we propose a novel training framework that is conceptually comprehensible and potentially easy to be generalized to all feasible algorithms for reinforcement learning. We employ Monte-carlo sampling to achieve raw data inputs, and train them in batch to achieve Markov decision process sequences and synchronously update the network parameters instead of experience replay. This training framework proves to optimize the unbiased approximation of loss function whose estimation exactly matches the real probability distribution data inputs follow, and thus have overwhelming advantages of sample efficiency and convergence rate over existing deep reinforcement learning after evaluating it on both discrete action spaces and continuous control problems. Besides, we propose several algorithms embedded with our new framework to deal with typical discrete and continuous scenarios. These algorithms prove to be far more efficient than their origin
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With AlphaGo defeats top human players, reinforcement learning(RL) algorithms have gradually become the code-base of building stronger artificial intelligence(AI). The RL algorithm design firstly needs to adapt to the specific environment, so the designed environment guides the rapid and profound development of RL algorithms. However, the existing environments, which can be divided into real world games and customized toy environments, have obvious shortcomings. For real world games, it is designed for human entertainment, and too much difficult for most of RL researchers. For customized toy environments, there is no widely accepted unified evaluation standard for all RL algorithms. Therefore, we introduce the first virtual user-friendly environment framework for RL. In this framework, the environment can be easily configured to realize all kinds of RL tasks in the mainstream research. Then all the mainstream state-of-the-art(SOTA) RL algorithms can be conveniently evaluated and compared. Therefore, our contributions mainly includes the following aspects: 1.single configured environment for all classification of SOTA RL algorithms; 2.combined environment of more than one classification RL algorithms; 3.the evaluation standard for all kinds of RL algorithms. With all these efforts, a possibility for breeding an AI with capability of general competency in a variety of tasks is provided, and maybe it will open up a new chapter for AI.
The success of deep learning in the computer vision and natural language processing communities can be attributed to training of very deep neural networks with millions or billions of parameters which can then be trained with massive amounts of data. However, similar trend has largely eluded training of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms where larger networks do not lead to performance improvement. Previous work has shown that this is mostly due to instability during training of deep RL agents when using larger networks. In this paper, we make an attempt to understand and address training of larger networks for deep RL. We first show that naively increasing network capacity does not improve performance. Then, we propose a novel method that consists of 1) wider networks with DenseNet connection, 2) decoupling representation learning from training of RL, 3) a distributed training method to mitigate overfitting problems. Using this three-fold technique, we show that we can train very large networks that result in significant performance gains. We present several ablation studies to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method and some intuitive understanding of the reasons for performance gain. We show that our proposed method outperforms other baseline algorithms on several challenging locomotion tasks.
Deep reinforcement learning has achieved significant success in many decision-making tasks in various fields. However, it requires a large training time of dense neural networks to obtain a good performance. This hinders its applicability on low-resource devices where memory and computation are strictly constrained. In a step towards enabling deep reinforcement learning agents to be applied to low-resource devices, in this work, we propose for the first time to dynamically train deep reinforcement learning agents with sparse neural networks from scratch. We adopt the evolution principles of dynamic sparse training in the reinforcement learning paradigm and introduce a training algorithm that optimizes the sparse topology and the weight values jointly to dynamically fit the incoming data. Our approach is easy to be integrated into existing deep reinforcement learning algorithms and has many favorable advantages. First, it allows for significant compression of the network size which reduces the memory and computation costs substantially. This would accelerate not only the agent inference but also its training process. Second, it speeds up the agent learning process and allows for reducing the number of required training steps. Third, it can achieve higher performance than training the dense counterpart network. We evaluate our approach on OpenAI gym continuous control tasks. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach in achieving higher performance than one of the state-of-art baselines with a 50% reduction in the network size and floating-point operations (FLOPs). Moreover, our proposed approach can reach the same performance achieved by the dense network with a 40-50% reduction in the number of training steps.
Understanding the role of (stochastic) gradient descent (SGD) in the training and generalisation of deep neural networks (DNNs) with ReLU activation has been the object study in the recent past. In this paper, we make use of deep gated networks (DGNs) as a framework to obtain insights about DNNs with ReLU activation. In DGNs, a single neuronal unit has two components namely the pre-activation input (equal to the inner product the weights of the layer and the previous layer outputs), and a gating value which belongs to $[0,1]$ and the output of the neuronal unit is equal to the multiplication of pre-activation input and the gating value. The standard DNN with ReLU activation, is a special case of the DGNs, wherein the gating value is $1/0$ based on whether or not the pre-activation input is positive or negative. We theoretically analyse and experiment with several variants of DGNs, each variant suited to understand a particular aspect of either training or generalisation in DNNs with ReLU activation. Our theory throws light on two questions namely i) why increasing depth till a point helps in training and ii) why increasing depth beyond a point hurts training? We also present experimental evidence to show that gate adaptation, i.e., the change of gating value through the course of training is key for generalisation.
Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation and off-policy sampling - this is known as the deadly triad. Emphatic temporal difference (ETD($lambda$)) algorithm ensures convergence in the linear case by appropriately weighting the TD($lambda$) updates. In this paper, we extend the use of emphatic methods to deep reinforcement learning agents. We show that naively adapting ETD($lambda$) to popular deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which use forward view multi-step returns, results in poor performance. We then derive new emphatic algorithms for use in the context of such algorithms, and we demonstrate that they provide noticeable benefits in small problems designed to highlight the instability of TD methods. Finally, we observed improved performance when applying these algorithms at scale on classic Atari games from the Arcade Learning Environment.
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