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Register a new userMaximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning with Mixture Policies
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Added by
Guy Tennenholtz
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Mixture models are an expressive hypothesis class that can approximate a rich set of policies. However, using mixture policies in the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) framework is not straightforward. The entropy of a mixture model is not equal to the sum of its components, nor does it have a closed-form expression in most cases. Using such policies in MaxEnt algorithms, therefore, requires constructing a tractable approximation of the mixture entropy. In this paper, we derive a simple, low-variance mixture-entropy estimator. We show that it is closely related to the sum of marginal entropies. Equipped with our entropy estimator, we derive an algorithmic variant of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) to the mixture policy case and evaluate it on a series of continuous control tasks.
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In this paper, we present a new class of Markov decision processes (MDPs), called Tsallis MDPs, with Tsallis entropy maximization, which generalizes existing maximum entropy reinforcement learning (RL). A Tsallis MDP provides a unified framework for the original RL problem and RL with various types of entropy, including the well-known standard Shannon-Gibbs (SG) entropy, using an additional real-valued parameter, called an entropic index. By controlling the entropic index, we can generate various types of entropy, including the SG entropy, and a different entropy results in a different class of the optimal policy in Tsallis MDPs. We also provide a full mathematical analysis of Tsallis MDPs, including the optimality condition, performance error bounds, and convergence. Our theoretical result enables us to use any positive entropic index in RL. To handle complex and large-scale problems, we propose a model-free actor-critic RL method using Tsallis entropy maximization. We evaluate the regularization effect of the Tsallis entropy with various values of entropic indices and show that the entropic index controls the exploration tendency of the proposed method. For a different type of RL problems, we find that a different value of the entropic index is desirable. The proposed method is evaluated using the MuJoCo simulator and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new algorithm, called soft Q-learning, that expresses the optimal policy via a Boltzmann distribution. We use the recently proposed amortized Stein variational gradient descent to learn a stochastic sampling network that approximates samples from this distribution. The benefits of the proposed algorithm include improved exploration and compositionality that allows transferring skills between tasks, which we confirm in simulated experiments with swimming and walking robots. We also draw a connection to actor-critic methods, which can be viewed performing approximate inference on the corresponding energy-based model.
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.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents trained in a limited set of environments tend to suffer overfitting and fail to generalize to unseen testing environments. To improve their generalizability, data augmentation approaches (e.g. cutout and random convolution) are previously explored to increase the data diversity. However, we find these approaches only locally perturb the observations regardless of the training environments, showing limited effectiveness on enhancing the data diversity and the generalization performance. In this work, we introduce a simple approach, named mixreg, which trains agents on a mixture of observations from different training environments and imposes linearity constraints on the observation interpolations and the supervision (e.g. associated reward) interpolations. Mixreg increases the data diversity more effectively and helps learn smoother policies. We verify its effectiveness on improving generalization by conducting extensive experiments on the large-scale Procgen benchmark. Results show mixreg outperforms the well-established baselines on unseen testing environments by a large margin. Mixreg is simple, effective and general. It can be applied to both policy-based and value-based RL algorithms. Code is available at https://github.com/kaixin96/mixreg .
Deep networks have enabled reinforcement learning to scale to more complex and challenging domains, but these methods typically require large quantities of training data. An alternative is to use sample-efficient episodic control methods: neuro-inspired algorithms which use non-/semi-parametric models that predict values based on storing and retrieving previously experienced transitions. One way to further improve the sample efficiency of these approaches is to use more principled exploration strategies. In this work, we therefore propose maximum entropy mellowmax episodic control (MEMEC), which samples actions according to a Boltzmann policy with a state-dependent temperature. We demonstrate that MEMEC outperforms other uncertainty- and softmax-based exploration methods on classic reinforcement learning environments and Atari games, achieving both more rapid learning and higher final rewards.
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