Title
Rethinking Stochasticity in Neural Networks for Reinforcement Learning with Continuous Actions
Abstract
In this paper, we reconsider the use of stochasticity in neural networks for reinforcement learning in continuous action spaces. We consider stochasticity from both a reinforcement learning perspective and a neural networks perspective, leading us to reconsider whether noise sampling for exploration should take place at the level of the synapse (S), unit (U), or network (N). To investigate this question, we introduce a superset of the venerable multiparameter REINFORCE algorithm that we call REINFORCE SUN because it allows for stochasticity at each of these levels, and compare these variants on multidimensional problem sets with either continuous or discrete states. Our results show that moving stochasticity from the unit level to the synapse level substantially improves performance across all instances considered. As placing stochasticity at the unit level is nearly ubiquitous within the discipline, our results suggest that this standard practice should be reexamined more broadly.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/SSCI44817.2019.9002826
2019 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI)
Keywords
Field
DocType
reinforcement learning,neural networks,stochasticity,gradient descent,REINFORCE
Gradient descent,Subset and superset,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Sampling (statistics),Artificial neural network,Reinforcement learning
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-2486-5
0
0.34
References 
Authors
2
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Syed Naveed Hussain Shah100.34
Dean Frederick Hougen200.34