Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of constraints, including for instance constraints on the entropy of a policy or to restrict the possible set of actions or states accessible to an agent. Convergence guarantees for evolutionary strategies to optimize stochastic constrained problems are however lacking in the literature. In this work, we address this problem by designing a novel optimization algorithm with a sufficient decrease mechanism that ensures convergence and that is based only on estimates of the functions. We demonstrate the applicability of this algorithm on two types of experiments: i) a control task for maximizing rewards and ii) maximizing rewards subject to a non-relaxable set of constraints.
In real world, affecting the environment by a weak policy can be expensive or very risky, therefore hampers real world applications of reinforcement learning. Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) can learn policies from a given dataset without interacting with the environment. However, the dataset is the only source of information for an Offline RL algorithm and determines the performance of the learned policy. We still lack studies on how dataset characteristics influence different Offline RL algorithms. Therefore, we conducted a comprehensive empirical analysis of how dataset characteristics effect the performance of Offline RL algorithms for discrete action environments. A dataset is characterized by two metrics: (1) the average dataset return measured by the Trajectory Quality (TQ) and ( 2) the coverage measured by the State-Action Coverage (SACo). We found that variants of the off-policy Deep Q-Network family require datasets with high SACo to perform well. Algorithms that constrain the learned policy towards the given dataset perform well for datasets with high TQ or SACo. For datasets with high TQ, Behavior Cloning outperforms or performs similarly to the best Offline RL algorithms.
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