Staggered Environment Resets Improve Massively Parallel On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Sid Bharthulwar, Stone Tao, Hao Su

Keywords: reinforcement learning, massively parallel RL, robotics

TL;DR: Staggered resets fix harmful nonstationarity in massively parallel RL's short synchronous rollouts by varying environment start times, improving state coverage and boosting sample efficiency, performance, and scalability.

Abstract: Massively parallel GPU simulation environments have accelerated reinforcement learning (RL) research by enabling fast data collection for on-policy RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). To maximize throughput, it is common to use short rollouts per policy update, increasing the update-to-data (UTD) ratio. However, we find that, in this setting, standard synchronous resets introduce harmful nonstationarity, skewing the learning signal and destabilizing training. We introduce staggered resets, a simple yet effective technique where environments are initialized and reset at varied points within the task horizon. This yields training batches with more uniform state visitation distributions, reducing the nonstationarity induced by synchronized rollouts. We characterize dimensions along which RL environments can benefit significantly from staggered resets through toy environments. We then apply this technique to challenging high-dimensional robotics environments, achieving significantly higher sample efficiency, faster wall-clock convergence, and stronger final performance. Finally, this technique scales better with more parallel environments compared to naive synchronized rollouts, yielding more optimal utilization of computational resources.

Submission Number: 25