English

Rethinking Population-assisted Off-policy Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2023-05-05 v1 Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

While off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are sample efficient due to gradient-based updates and data reuse in the replay buffer, they struggle with convergence to local optima due to limited exploration. On the other hand, population-based algorithms offer a natural exploration strategy, but their heuristic black-box operators are inefficient. Recent algorithms have integrated these two methods, connecting them through a shared replay buffer. However, the effect of using diverse data from population optimization iterations on off-policy RL algorithms has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we first analyze the use of off-policy RL algorithms in combination with population-based algorithms, showing that the use of population data could introduce an overlooked error and harm performance. To test this, we propose a uniform and scalable training design and conduct experiments on our tailored framework in robot locomotion tasks from the OpenAI gym. Our results substantiate that using population data in off-policy RL can cause instability during training and even degrade performance. To remedy this issue, we further propose a double replay buffer design that provides more on-policy data and show its effectiveness through experiments. Our results offer practical insights for training these hybrid methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.02949,
  title  = {Rethinking Population-assisted Off-policy Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Bowen Zheng and Ran Cheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.02949},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO '23)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:25:50.798Z