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Trust Region-Guided Proximal Policy Optimization (arxiv.org)
1 point by pplonski86 on Jan 30, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Agents trained with PPO clip how far their strategy may shift each step, which can stall learning when it starts off badly. The new version adjusts that clip inside a safe-change limit, exploring more and carrying a proven better guarantee than standard PPO.

Abstract

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, as a model-free RL method, the success of PPO relies heavily on the effectiveness of its exploratory policy search. In this paper, we give an in-depth analysis on the exploration behavior of PPO, and show that PPO is prone to suffer from the risk of lack of exploration especially under the case of bad initialization, which may lead to the failure of training or being trapped in bad local optima. To address these issues, we proposed a novel policy optimization method, named Trust Region-Guided PPO (TRGPPO), which adaptively adjusts the clipping range within the trust region. We formally show that this method not only improves the exploration ability within the trust region but enjoys a better performance bound compared to the original PPO as well. Extensive experiments verify the advantage of the proposed method.

Yuhui Wang, Hao He, Xiaoyang Tan, Yaozhong Gan
arXiv:1901.10314 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Jan 29, 2019 · updated Nov 8, 2019
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