DreamSmooth: Improving Model-based Reinforcement Learning via Reward Smoothing

Published: 16 Jan 2024, Last Modified: 23 Apr 2024ICLR 2024 posterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics.
Keywords: Model-based Reinforcement Learning; Reward Shaping; Reward Smoothing
Submission Guidelines: I certify that this submission complies with the submission instructions as described on https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2024/AuthorGuide.
TL;DR: We show that reward prediction is challenging in many sparse-reward tasks, and propose a simple yet effective method, reward smoothing, which effectively facilitates reward prediction and thus, improves model-based reinforcement learning.
Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we found that surprisingly, reward prediction is often a bottleneck of MBRL, especially for sparse rewards that are challenging (or even ambiguous) to predict. Motivated by the intuition that humans can learn from rough reward estimates, we propose a simple yet effective reward smoothing approach, DreamSmooth, which learns to predict a temporally-smoothed reward, instead of the exact reward at the given timestep. We empirically show that DreamSmooth achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-horizon sparse-reward tasks both in sample efficiency and final performance without losing performance on common benchmarks, such as Deepmind Control Suite and Atari benchmarks.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors' identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Primary Area: reinforcement learning
Submission Number: 1586
Loading