Value-Evolutionary-Based Reinforcement Learning

Combining Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for policy search has been proven to improve RL performance. However, previous works largely overlook value-based RL in favor of merging EAs with policy-based RL. This paper introduces Value-Evolutionary-Based Reinforcement Learning (VEB-RL) that focuses on the integration of EAs with value-based RL. The framework maintains a population of value functions instead of policies and leverages negative Temporal Difference error as the fitness metric for evolution. The metric is more sample-efficient for population evaluation than cumulative rewards and is closely associated with the accuracy of the value function approximation. Additionally, VEB-RL enables elites of the population to interact with the environment to offer high-quality samples for RL optimization, whereas the RL value function participates in the population’s evolution in each generation. Experiments on MinAtar and Atari demonstrate the superiority of VEB-RL in significantly improving DQN, Rainbow, and SPR. Our code is available on https: //github. com/yeshenpy/VEB-RL.

Authors

• Pengyi Li 0001
• Jianye Hao
• Hongyao Tang
• Yan Zheng 0002
• Fazl Barez

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