强化学习中分类评价器的支撑区间学习 / Learning the Supports for Categorical Critic in Reinforcement Learning
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出一种在强化学习中动态学习价值函数分类表示支撑区间上下界的方法,避免了传统方法需预先固定区间的问题,并在理论上证明该方法能更紧地约束贝尔曼误差,实验显示其在连续控制任务上匹配或优于现有方法。
Value functions are an essential component in actor-critic based deep reinforcement learning (RL). Conventionally, these functions are trained as a regression task by minimising the mean squared error (MSE) relative to bootstrapped target values. Meanwhile, in distributional RL, a distribution of returns is modelled based on the distributional Bellman operator. This work investigates the Gaussian Histogram Loss (HL-Gauss), a recent approach that reframes value estimation as classification by encoding each scalar Bellman target as a Gaussian-smoothed categorical target. Despite its potential, applying histogram-based losses to RL presents inherent challenges, most notably the requirement to pre-define a fixed support interval, which is often complicated by the non-stationary and stochastic nature of target values typically found in RL tasks. In this work, we propose an approach that dynamically learns the lower and upper bounds of the support instead of assigning them beforehand. We derive an objective that jointly learns these bounds whilst learning the categorical representation of the scalar values, and we show that this objective forms an upper bound on the mean-squared Bellman error. Our theoretical analysis further shows that this bound is tighter than that of non-learned supports of HL-Gauss. Empirically, the proposed objective enables stable adaptation of the support interval and matches HL-Gauss-based actor-critic algorithms on most continuous-control tasks whilst improving on a subset, without requiring a pre-specified support interval.
强化学习中分类评价器的支撑区间学习 / Learning the Supports for Categorical Critic in Reinforcement Learning
本文提出一种在强化学习中动态学习价值函数分类表示支撑区间上下界的方法,避免了传统方法需预先固定区间的问题,并在理论上证明该方法能更紧地约束贝尔曼误差,实验显示其在连续控制任务上匹配或优于现有方法。
源自 arXiv: 2607.01880