MEET: A Monte Carlo Exploration-Exploitation Trade-off for Buffer Sampling
Abstract
Data selection is essential for any data-based optimization technique, such as Reinforcement Learning. State-of-the-art sampling strategies for the experience replay buffer improve the performance of the Reinforcement Learning agent. However, they do not incorporate uncertainty in the Q-Value estimation. Consequently, they cannot adapt the sampling strategies, including exploration and exploitation of transitions, to the complexity of the task. To address this, this paper proposes a new sampling strategy that leverages the exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is enabled by the uncertainty estimation of the Q-Value function, which guides the sampling to explore more significant transitions and, thus, learn a more efficient policy. Experiments on classical control environments demonstrate stable results across various environments. They show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art sampling strategies for dense rewards w.r.t. convergence and peak performance by 26% on average.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2210.13545,
title = {MEET: A Monte Carlo Exploration-Exploitation Trade-off for Buffer Sampling},
author = {Julius Ott and Lorenzo Servadei and Jose Arjona-Medina and Enrico Rinaldi and Gianfranco Mauro and Daniela Sánchez Lopera and Michael Stephan and Thomas Stadelmayer and Avik Santra and Robert Wille},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.13545},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Accepted at ICASSP 2023