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Title: Growing Action Spaces

Paper content:
In complex tasks, such as those with large combinatorial action spaces, random exploration may be too inefficient to achieve meaningful learning progress.
In this work, we use a curriculum of progressively growing action spaces to accelerate learning.
We assume the environment is out of our control, but that the agent may set an internal curriculum by initially restricting its action space.
Our approach uses off-policy reinforcement learning to estimate optimal value functions for multiple action spaces simultaneously and efficiently transfers data,  value estimates, and state representations from restricted action spaces to the full task.
We show the efficacy of our approach in proof-of-concept control tasks and on challenging large-scale StarCraft micromanagement tasks with large, multi-agent action spaces.
The value of curricula has been well established in machine learning, reinforcement learning, and in biological systems.
When a desired behaviour is sufficiently complex, or the environment too unforgiving, it can be intractable to learn the behaviour from scratch through random exploration.
Instead, by "starting small" (Elman, 1993) , an agent can build skills, representations, and a dataset of meaningful experiences that allow it to accelerate its learning.
Such curricula can drastically improve sample efficiency (Bengio et al., 2009 ).
Typically, curriculum learning uses a progression of tasks or environments.
Simple tasks that provide meaningful feedback to random agents are used first, and some schedule is used to introduce more challenging tasks later during training (Graves et al., 2017) .
However, in many contexts neither the agent nor experimenter has such unimpeded control over the environment.
In this work, we instead make use of curricula that are internal to the agent, simplifying the exploration problem without changing the environment.
In particular, we grow the size of the action space of reinforcement learning agents over the course of training.
At the beginning of training, our agents use a severely restricted action space.
This helps exploration by guiding the agent towards rewards and meaningful experiences, and provides low variance updates during learning.
The action space is then grown progressively.
Eventually, using the most unrestricted action space, the agents are able to find superior policies.
Each action space is a strict superset of the more restricted ones.
This paradigm requires some domain knowledge to identify a suitable hierarchy of action spaces.
However, such a hierarchy is often easy to find.
Continuous action spaces can be discretised with increasing resolution.
Similarly, curricula for coping with the large combinatorial action spaces induced by many agents can be obtained from the prior that nearby agents are more likely to need to coordinate.
For example, in routing or traffic flow problems nearby agents or nodes may wish to adopt similar local policies to alleviate global congestion.
Our method will be valuable when it is possible to identify a restricted action space in which random exploration leads to significantly more meaningful experiences than random exploration in the full action space.
We propose an approach that uses off-policy reinforcement learning to improve sample efficiency in this type of curriculum learning.
Since data from exploration using a restricted action space is still valid in the Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) corresponding to the less restricted action spaces, we can learn value functions in the less restricted action space with 'off-action-space' data collected by exploring in the restricted action space.
In our approach, we learn value functions corresponding to each level of restriction simultaneously.
We can use the relationships of these value functions to each other to accelerate learning further, by using value estimates themselves as initialisations or as bootstrap targets for the less restricted action spaces, as well as sharing learned state representations.
Empirically, we first demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in two simple control tasks, in which the resolution of discretised actions is progressively increased.
We then tackle a more challenging set of problems with combinatorial action spaces, in the context of StarCraft micromanagement with large numbers of agents (50-100).
Given the heuristic prior that nearby agents in a multiagent setting are likely to need to coordinate, we use hierarchical clustering to impose a restricted action space on the agents.
Agents in a cluster are restricted to take the same action, but we progressively increase the number of groups that can act independently of one another over the course of training.
Our method substantially improves sample efficiency on a number of tasks, outperforming learning any particular action space from scratch, a number of ablations, and an actor-critic baseline that learns a single value function for the behaviour policy, as in the work of Czarnecki et al. (2018) .
Code is available, but redacted here for anonymity.
We also compare against a Mix&Match (MM) baseline using the actor-critic approach of Czarnecki et al. (2018) , but adapted for our new multi-agent setting and supporting a third level in the mixture Figure 3 : StarCraft micromanagement with growing action spaces.
We report the mean and standard error (over 5 random seeds) of the evaluation winrate during training, with a moving average over the past 500 episodes.
of policies (A 0 , A 1 , A 2 ).
We tuned hyperparameters for all algorithms on the easiest, fastesttraining scenario (80 marines vs. 80 marines).
On this scenario, MM learns faster but plateaus at the same level as GAS(2).
MM underperforms on all other scenarios to varying degrees.
Learning separate value functions for each A , as in our approach, appears to accelerate the transfer learning in the majority of settings.
Another possible explanation is that MM may be more sensitive to hyperparameters.
We do not use population based training to tune hyperparameters on the fly, which could otherwise help MM adapt to each scenario.
However, GAS would presumably also benefit from population based training, at the cost of further computation and sample efficiency.
The policies learned by GAS exhibit good tactics.
Control of separate groups is used to position our army so as to maximise the number of attacking units by forming a wall or a concave that surrounds the enemy, and by coordinating a simultaneous assault.
Figure 5 in the Appendix shows some example learned policies.
In scenarios where MM fails to learn well, it typically falls into a local minimum of attacking head-on.
In each scenario, we test an ablation GAS (2): ON-AC that does not use our off-action-space update, instead training each level of the Q-function only with data sampled at that level.
This ablation performs somewhat worse on average, although the size of the impact varies in different scenarios.
In some tasks, it is beneficial to accelerate learning for finer action spaces using data drawn from the off-action-space policy.
In Appendix A.1.1, the same ablation shows significantly worse performance on the Mountain Car task and comparable performance on Acrobot.
We present a number of further ablations on two scenarios.
The most striking failure is of the 'SEP-Q' variant which does not compose the value function as a sum of scores in the hierarchy.
It is critical to ensure that values are well-initialised as we move to less restricted action spaces.
In the discretised continuous control tasks, 'SEP-Q' also underperforms, although less dramatically.
The choice of target is less important: performing a max over coarser action spaces to construct the target as described in Section 4.2 does not improve learning speed as intended.
One potential reason is that maximising over more potential targets increases the maximisation bias already present in Q-learning (Hasselt, 2010).
Additionally, we use an n-step objective which combines a partial onpolicy return with the bootstrap target, which could reduce the relative impact of the choice of target.
Finally, we experiment with a higher .
Unfortunately, asymptotic performance is degraded slightly once we use A 3 or higher.
One potential reason is that it decreases the average group size, pushing against the limits of the spatial resolution that may be captured by our CNN architecture.
Higher increases the amount of time that there are fewer units than groups, leaving certain groups empty and rendering our masked pooling operation degenerate.
We do not see a fundamental limitation that should restrict the further growth of the action space, although we note that most hierarchical approaches in the literature avoid too many levels of depth.
For example, Czarnecki et al. (2018) only mix between two sizes of action spaces rather than the three we progress through in the majority of our GAS experiments.
In this work, we presented an algorithm for growing action spaces with off-policy reinforcement learning to efficiently shape exploration.
We learn value functions for all levels of a hierarchy of restricted action spaces simultaneously, and transfer data, value estimates, and representations from more restricted to less restricted action spaces.
We also present a strategy for using this approach in cooperative multi-agent control.
In discretised continuous control tasks and challenging multiagent StarCraft micromanagement scenarios, we demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of our approach and the value of off-action-space learning.
An interesting avenue for future work is to automatically identify how to restrict action spaces for efficient exploration, potentially through meta-optimisation.
We also look to explore more complex and deeper hierarchies of action spaces.

assistant: text: Progressively growing the available action space is a great curriculum for learning agents