What Matters In On-Policy Reinforcement Learning? A Large-Scale Empirical Study (Paper Explained)

#ai #research #machinelearning

Online Reinforcement Learning is a flourishing field with countless methods for practitioners to choose from. However, each of those methods comes with a plethora of hyperparameter choices. This paper builds a unified framework for five continuous control tasks and investigates in a large-scale study the effects of these choices. As a result, they come up with a set of recommendations for future research and applications.

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Intro & Overview
3:55 - Parameterized Agents
7:00 - Unified Online RL and Parameter Choices
14:10 - Policy Loss
16:40 - Network Architecture
20:25 - Initial Policy
24:20 - Normalization & Clipping
26:30 - Advantage Estimation
28:55 - Training Setup
33:05 - Timestep Handling
34:10 - Optimizers
35:05 - Regularization
36:10 - Conclusion & Comments

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.05990

Abstract:
In recent years, on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to many different continuous control tasks. While RL algorithms are often conceptually simple, their state-of-the-art implementations take numerous low- and high-level design decisions that strongly affect the performance of the resulting agents. Those choices are usually not extensively discussed in the literature, leading to discrepancy between published descriptions of algorithms and their implementations. This makes it hard to attribute progress in RL and slows down overall progress (Engstrom'20). As a step towards filling that gap, we implement over 50 such "choices" in a unified on-policy RL framework, allowing us to investigate their impact in a large-scale empirical study. We train over 250'000 agents in five continuous control environments of different complexity and provide insights and practical recommendations for on-policy training of RL agents.

Authors: Marcin Andrychowicz, Anton Raichuk, Piotr Stańczyk, Manu Orsini, Sertan Girgin, Raphael Marinier, Léonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly, Olivier Bachem


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