Time-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic Stateful Policies
Firas Al-Hafez Guoping Zhao Jan Peters Davide Tateo
Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as
handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing
an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method
for training stateful policies is Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT), which
comes with significant drawbacks, such as slow training due to sequential
gradient propagation and the occurrence of vanishing or exploding gradients.
The gradient is often truncated to address these issues, resulting in a biased
policy update. We present a novel approach for training stateful policies by
decomposing the latter into a stochastic internal state kernel and a stateless
policy, jointly optimized by following the stateful policy gradient. We
introduce different versions of the stateful policy gradient theorem, enabling
us to easily instantiate stateful variants of popular reinforcement learning
and imitation learning algorithms. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical
analysis of our new gradient estimator and compare it with BPTT. We evaluate
our approach on complex continuous control tasks, e.g., humanoid locomotion,
and demonstrate that our gradient estimator scales effectively with task
complexity while offering a faster and simpler alternative to BPTT.