Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Divergence-Augmented Policy Optimization

Qing Wang · Yingru Li · Jiechao Xiong · Tong Zhang

East Exhibition Hall B + C #204

Keywords: [ Reinforcement Learning and Planning ] [ Reinforcement Learning ] [ Reinforcement Learning and Planning ]


Abstract:

In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature convergence and instability. This paper introduces a method to stabilize policy optimization when off-policy data are reused. The idea is to include a Bregman divergence between the behavior policy that generates the data and the current policy to ensure small and safe policy updates with off-policy data. The Bregman divergence is calculated between the state distributions of two policies, instead of only on the action probabilities, leading to a divergence augmentation formulation. Empirical experiments on Atari games show that in the data-scarce scenario where the reuse of off-policy data becomes necessary, our method can achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content