English

Stratified Experience Replay: Correcting Multiplicity Bias in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2021-02-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods rely on experience replay to approximate the minibatched supervised learning setting; however, unlike supervised learning where access to lots of training data is crucial to generalization, replay-based deep RL appears to struggle in the presence of extraneous data. Recent works have shown that the performance of Deep Q-Network (DQN) degrades when its replay memory becomes too large. This suggests that outdated experiences somehow impact the performance of deep RL, which should not be the case for off-policy methods like DQN. Consequently, we re-examine the motivation for sampling uniformly over a replay memory, and find that it may be flawed when using function approximation. We show that -- despite conventional wisdom -- sampling from the uniform distribution does not yield uncorrelated training samples and therefore biases gradients during training. Our theory prescribes a special non-uniform distribution to cancel this effect, and we propose a stratified sampling scheme to efficiently implement it.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.11319,
  title  = {Stratified Experience Replay: Correcting Multiplicity Bias in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Brett Daley and Cameron Hickert and Christopher Amato},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.11319},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

AAMAS 2021 Extended Abstract, 3 pages, 3 figures