Title
Model-free Policy Learning with Reward Gradients
Abstract
Despite the increasing popularity of policy gradient methods, they are yet to be widely utilized in sample-scarce applications, such as robotics. The sample efficiency could be improved by making best usage of available information. As a key component in reinforcement learning, the reward function is usually devised carefully to guide the agent. Hence, the reward function is usually known, allowing access to not only scalar reward signals but also reward gradients. To benefit from reward gradients, previous works require the knowledge of environment dynamics, which are hard to obtain. In this work, we develop the Reward Policy Gradient estimator, a novel approach that integrates reward gradients without learning a model. Bypassing the model dynamics allows our estimator to achieve a better bias-variance trade-off, which results in a higher sample efficiency, as shown in the empirical analysis. Our method also boosts the performance of Proximal Policy Optimization on different MuJoCo control tasks. (1)
Year
Venue
DocType
2022
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND STATISTICS, VOL 151
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
151
2640-3498
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qingfong Lan100.34
Samuele Tosatto200.68
Homayoon Farrahi300.34
A. Rupam Mahmood401.01