Discretizing Continuous Action Space with Unimodal Probability Distributions for On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00309v1
• Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2024 06:06:53 GMT
• Title: Discretizing Continuous Action Space with Unimodal Probability Distributions for On-Policy Reinforcement Learning
• Authors: Yuanyang Zhu, Zhi Wang, Yuanheng Zhu, Chunlin Chen, Dongbin Zhao,
• Abstract summary: We introduce a straightforward architecture that constrains the discrete policy to be unimodal using Poisson probability distributions. We conduct experiments to show that the discrete policy with the unimodal probability distribution provides significantly faster convergence and higher performance for on-policy reinforcement learning algorithms.
• Score: 20.48276559928517
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: For on-policy reinforcement learning, discretizing action space for continuous control can easily express multiple modes and is straightforward to optimize. However, without considering the inherent ordering between the discrete atomic actions, the explosion in the number of discrete actions can possess undesired properties and induce a higher variance for the policy gradient estimator. In this paper, we introduce a straightforward architecture that addresses this issue by constraining the discrete policy to be unimodal using Poisson probability distributions. This unimodal architecture can better leverage the continuity in the underlying continuous action space using explicit unimodal probability distributions. We conduct extensive experiments to show that the discrete policy with the unimodal probability distribution provides significantly faster convergence and higher performance for on-policy reinforcement learning algorithms in challenging control tasks, especially in highly complex tasks such as Humanoid. We provide theoretical analysis on the variance of the policy gradient estimator, which suggests that our attentively designed unimodal discrete policy can retain a lower variance and yield a stable learning process.

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