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Register a new userWeighted Entropy Modification for Soft Actor-Critic
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Yizhou Zhao
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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We generalize the existing principle of the maximum Shannon entropy in reinforcement learning (RL) to weighted entropy by characterizing the state-action pairs with some qualitative weights, which can be connected with prior knowledge, experience replay, and evolution process of the policy. We propose an algorithm motivated for self-balancing exploration with the introduced weight function, which leads to state-of-the-art performance on Mujoco tasks despite its simplicity in implementation.
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Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and brittle convergence properties, which necessitate meticulous hyperparameter tuning. Both of these challenges severely limit the applicability of such methods to complex, real-world domains. In this paper, we propose soft actor-critic, an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm based on the maximum entropy reinforcement learning framework. In this framework, the actor aims to maximize expected reward while also maximizing entropy. That is, to succeed at the task while acting as randomly as possible. Prior deep RL methods based on this framework have been formulated as Q-learning methods. By combining off-policy updates with a stable stochastic actor-critic formulation, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of continuous control benchmark tasks, outperforming prior on-policy and off-policy methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, in contrast to other off-policy algorithms, our approach is very stable, achieving very similar performance across different random seeds.
Offline Reinforcement Learning promises to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without the need for exploration. However, existing Q-learning and actor-critic based off-policy RL algorithms fail when bootstrapping from out-of-distribution (OOD) actions or states. We hypothesize that a key missing ingredient from the existing methods is a proper treatment of uncertainty in the offline setting. We propose Uncertainty Weighted Actor-Critic (UWAC), an algorithm that detects OOD state-action pairs and down-weights their contribution in the training objectives accordingly. Implementation-wise, we adopt a practical and effective dropout-based uncertainty estimation method that introduces very little overhead over existing RL algorithms. Empirically, we observe that UWAC substantially improves model stability during training. In addition, UWAC out-performs existing offline RL methods on a variety of competitive tasks, and achieves significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art baseline on datasets with sparse demonstrations collected from human experts.
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: high sample complexity and brittleness to hyperparameters. Both of these challenges limit the applicability of such methods to real-world domains. In this paper, we describe Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), our recently introduced off-policy actor-critic algorithm based on the maximum entropy RL framework. In this framework, the actor aims to simultaneously maximize expected return and entropy. That is, to succeed at the task while acting as randomly as possible. We extend SAC to incorporate a number of modifications that accelerate training and improve stability with respect to the hyperparameters, including a constrained formulation that automatically tunes the temperature hyperparameter. We systematically evaluate SAC on a range of benchmark tasks, as well as real-world challenging tasks such as locomotion for a quadrupedal robot and robotic manipulation with a dexterous hand. With these improvements, SAC achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming prior on-policy and off-policy methods in sample-efficiency and asymptotic performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, in contrast to other off-policy algorithms, our approach is very stable, achieving similar performance across different random seeds. These results suggest that SAC is a promising candidate for learning in real-world robotics tasks.
It is difficult to be able to imitate well in unknown states from a small amount of expert data and sampling data. Supervised learning methods such as Behavioral Cloning do not require sampling data, but usually suffer from distribution shift. The methods based on reinforcement learning, such as inverse reinforcement learning and generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL), can learn from only a few expert data. However, they often need to interact with the environment. Soft Q imitation learning addressed the problems, and it was shown that it could learn efficiently by combining Behavioral Cloning and soft Q-learning with constant rewards. In order to make this algorithm more robust to distribution shift, we propose Discriminator Soft Actor Critic (DSAC). It uses a reward function based on adversarial inverse reinforcement learning instead of constant rewards. We evaluated it on PyBullet environments with only four expert trajectories.
Exploration-exploitation dilemma has long been a crucial issue in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically balance between these two. Our method is built upon the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, which uses an entropy temperature that balances the original task reward and the policy entropy, and hence controls the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. It is empirically shown that SAC is very sensitive to this hyperparameter, and the follow-up work (SAC-v2), which uses constrained optimization for automatic adjustment, has some limitations. The core of our method, namely Meta-SAC, is to use metagradient along with a novel meta objective to automatically tune the entropy temperature in SAC. We show that Meta-SAC achieves promising performances on several of the Mujoco benchmarking tasks, and outperforms SAC-v2 over 10% in one of the most challenging tasks, humanoid-v2.
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