I4R: Promoting Deep Reinforcement Learning by the Indicator for Expressive Representations

I4R: Promoting Deep Reinforcement Learning by the Indicator for Expressive Representations

Xufang Luo, Qi Meng, Di He, Wei Chen, Yunhong Wang

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2669-2675. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/370

Learning expressive representations is always crucial for well-performed policies in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Different from supervised learning, in DRL, accurate targets are not always available, and some inputs with different actions only have tiny differences, which stimulates the demand for learning expressive representations. In this paper, firstly, we empirically compare the representations of DRL models with different performances. We observe that the representations of a better state extractor (SE) are more scattered than a worse one when they are visualized. Thus, we investigate the singular values of representation matrix, and find that, better SEs always correspond to smaller differences among these singular values. Next, based on such observations, we define an indicator of the representations for DRL model, which is the Number of Significant Singular Values (NSSV) of a representation matrix. Then, we propose I4R algorithm, to improve DRL algorithms by adding the corresponding regularization term to enhance the NSSV. Finally, we apply I4R to both policy gradient and value based algorithms on Atari games, and the results show the superiority of our proposed method.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Deep Reinforcement Learning
Machine Learning Applications: Game Playing