Benchmarking Actor-Critic Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Robotics Control With Action Constraints

Kazumi Kasaura, Shuwa Miura, Tadashi Kozuno, Ryo Yonetani, Kenta Hoshino, Yohei Hosoe

Abstract: This study presents a benchmark for evaluating action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In action-constrained RL, each action taken by the learning system must comply with certain constraints. These constraints are crucial for ensuring the feasibility and safety of actions in real-world systems. We evaluate existing algorithms and their novel variants across multiple robotics control environments, encompassing multiple action constraint types. Our evaluation provides the first in-depth perspective of the field, revealing surprising insights, including the effectiveness of a straightforward baseline approach. The benchmark problems and associated code utilized in our experiments are made available online at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">github.com/omron-sinicx/action-constrained-RL-benchmark</uri> for further research and development.