Abstract
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given M base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform each of the base ones. This can be useful in tuning across controllers, learnt possibly in mismatched or simulated environments, to obtain a good controller for a given target environment with relatively few trials. Towards this, we propose two algorithms: (1) a Policy Gradient-based approach; and (2) an algorithm that can switch between a simple Actor-Critic (AC) based scheme and a Natural Actor-Critic (NAC) scheme depending on the available information. Both algorithms operate over a class of improper mixtures of the given controllers. For the first case, we derive convergence rate guarantees assuming access to a gradient oracle. For the AC-based approach we provide convergence rate guarantees to a stationary point in the basic AC case and to a global optimum in the NAC case. Numerical results on (i) the standard control theoretic benchmark of stabilizing an cartpole; and (ii) a constrained queueing task show that our improper policy optimization algorithm can stabilize the system even when the base policies at its disposal are unstable.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 25867-25919 |
Number of pages | 53 |
Journal | Proceedings of Machine Learning Research |
Volume | 162 |
State | Published - 2022 |
Event | 39th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2022 - Baltimore, United States Duration: 17 Jul 2022 → 23 Jul 2022 https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/ |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Artificial Intelligence
- Software
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Statistics and Probability