Hybrid Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning in Parameterized Action Space

Hybrid Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning in Parameterized Action Space

Zhou Fan, Rui Su, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2279-2285. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/316

In this paper we propose a hybrid architecture of actor-critic algorithms for reinforcement learning in parameterized action space, which consists of multiple parallel sub-actor networks to decompose the structured action space into simpler action spaces along with a critic network to guide the training of all sub-actor networks. While this paper is mainly focused on parameterized action space, the proposed architecture, which we call hybrid actor-critic, can be extended for more general action spaces which has a hierarchical structure. We present an instance of the hybrid actor-critic architecture based on proximal policy optimization (PPO), which we refer to as hybrid proximal policy optimization (H-PPO). Our experiments test H-PPO on a collection of tasks with parameterized action space, where H-PPO demonstrates superior performance over previous methods of parameterized action reinforcement learning.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Reinforcement Learning
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Reinforcement Learning