Episodic Reinforcement Learning with Expanded State-reward Space
Dayang Liang Yaru Zhang Yunlong Liu
Empowered by deep neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has
demonstrated tremendous empirical successes in various domains, including
games, health care, and autonomous driving. Despite these advancements, DRL is
still identified as data-inefficient as effective policies demand vast numbers
of environmental samples. Recently, episodic control (EC)-based model-free DRL
methods enable sample efficiency by recalling past experiences from episodic
memory. However, existing EC-based methods suffer from the limitation of
potential misalignment between the state and reward spaces for neglecting the
utilization of (past) retrieval states with extensive information, which
probably causes inaccurate value estimation and degraded policy performance. To
tackle this issue, we introduce an efficient EC-based DRL framework with
expanded state-reward space, where the expanded states used as the input and
the expanded rewards used in the training both contain historical and current
information. To be specific, we reuse the historical states retrieved by EC as
part of the input states and integrate the retrieved MC-returns into the
immediate reward in each interactive transition. As a result, our method is
able to simultaneously achieve the full utilization of retrieval information
and the better evaluation of state values by a Temporal Difference (TD) loss.
Empirical results on challenging Box2d and Mujoco tasks demonstrate the
superiority of our method over a recent sibling method and common baselines.
Further, we also verify our method's effectiveness in alleviating Q-value
overestimation by additional experiments of Q-value comparison.