In the practice of sequential decision making, agents are often designed to sense state at regular intervals of π time steps, π > 1, ignoring state information in between sensing steps. While it is clear that this practice can reduce sensing and compute costs, recent results indicate a further benefit. On many Atari console games, reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms deliver substantially better policies when run with π > 1-in fact with π even as high as 180. In this paper, we investigate the role of the parameter π in RL; π is called the "frame-skip" parameter, since states in the Atari domain are images. For evaluating a fixed policy, we observe that under standard conditions, frame-skipping does not affect asymptotic consistency. Depending on other parameters, it can possibly even benefit learning. To use π > 1 in the control setting, one must first specify which π-step open-loop action sequences can be executed in between sensing steps. We focus on "action-repetition", the common restriction of this choice to π-length sequences of the same action. We define a task-dependent quantity called the "price of inertia", in terms of which we upper-bound the loss incurred by action-repetition. We show that this loss may be offset by the gain brought to learning by a smaller task horizon. Our analysis is supported by experiments on different tasks and learning algorithms.
This paper proposes PuRL -a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based algorithm for pruning neural networks. Unlike current RL based model compression approaches where feedback is given only at the end of each episode to the agent, PuRL provides rewards at every pruning step. This enables PuRL to achieve sparsity and accuracy comparable to current state-of-the-art methods, while having a much shorter training cycle. PuRL achieves more than 80% sparsity on the ResNet-50 model while retaining a Top-1 accuracy of 75.37% on the ImageNet dataset. Through our experiments we show that PuRL is also able to sparsify already efficient architectures like MobileNet-V2. In addition to performance characterisation experiments, we also provide a discussion and analysis of the various RL design choices that went into the tuning of the Markov Decision Process underlying PuRL. Lastly, we point out that PuRL is simple to use and can be easily adapted for various architectures.
A tree-based online search algorithm iteratively simulates trajectories and updates Q-value information on a set of states represented by a tree structure. Alternatively, policy gradient based online search algorithms update the information obtained from simulated trajectories directly onto the parameters of the policy and has been found to be effective. While tree-based methods limit the updates from simulations to the states that exist in the tree and do not interpolate the information to nearby states, policy gradient search methods do not do explicit exploration. In this paper, we show that it is possible to combine and leverage the strengths of these two methods for improved search performance. We examine the key reasons behind the improvement and propose a simple yet effective online search method, named Exploratory Policy Gradient Search (ExPoSe), that updates both the parameters of the policy as well as search information on the states in the trajectory. We conduct experiments on complex planning problems, which include Sokoban and Hamiltonian cycle search in sparse graphs and show that combining exploration with policy gradient improves online search performance.
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