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Title: CAQL: Continuous Action Q-Learning

Paper content:
Reinforcement learning (RL) with value-based methods (e.g., Q-learning) has shown success in a variety of domains such as
games and recommender systems (RSs).
When the action space is finite, these algorithms implicitly finds a policy by learning the optimal value function, which are often very efficient.
However, one major challenge of extending Q-learning to tackle continuous-action RL problems is that obtaining optimal Bellman backup requires solving a continuous action-maximization (max-Q) problem.
While it is common to restrict the parameterization of the Q-function to be concave in actions to simplify the max-Q problem, such a restriction might lead to performance degradation.
Alternatively, when the Q-function is parameterized with a generic feed-forward neural network (NN), the max-Q problem can be NP-hard.
In this work, we propose the CAQL method which minimizes the Bellman residual using Q-learning with one of several plug-and-play action optimizers.
In particular, leveraging the strides of optimization theories in deep NN, we show that max-Q problem can be solved optimally with mixed-integer programming (MIP)---when the Q-function has sufficient representation power, this MIP-based optimization induces better policies and is more robust than counterparts, e.g., CEM or GA, that approximate the max-Q solution.
To speed up training of CAQL, we develop three techniques, namely
(i) dynamic tolerance,
(ii) dual filtering, and
(iii) clustering.
To speed up inference of CAQL, we introduce the action function that concurrently learns the optimal policy.
To demonstrate the efficiency of CAQL we compare it with state-of-the-art RL algorithms on benchmark continuous control problems that have different degrees of action constraints and show that CAQL significantly outperforms policy-based methods in heavily constrained environments.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown success in a variety of domains such as games (Mnih et al., 2013) and recommender systems (RSs) (Gauci et al., 2018) .
When the action space is finite, valuebased algorithms such as Q-learning (Watkins & Dayan, 1992) , which implicitly finds a policy by learning the optimal value function, are often very efficient because action optimization can be done by exhaustive enumeration.
By contrast, in problems with a continuous action spaces (e.g., robotics (Peters & Schaal, 2006) ), policy-based algorithms, such as policy gradient (PG) (Sutton et al., 2000; Silver et al., 2014) or cross-entropy policy search (CEPS) (Mannor et al., 2003; Kalashnikov et al., 2018) , which directly learn a return-maximizing policy, have proven more practical.
Recently, methods such as ensemble critic (Fujimoto et al., 2018) and entropy regularization (Haarnoja et al., 2018) have been developed to improve the performance of policy-based RL algorithms.
Policy-based approaches require a reasonable choice of policy parameterization.
In some continuous control problems, Gaussian distributions over actions conditioned on some state representation is used.
However, in applications such as RSs, where actions often take the form of high-dimensional item-feature vectors, policies cannot typically be modeled by common action distributions.
Furthermore, the admissible action set in RL is constrained in practice, for example, when actions must lie within a specific range for safety (Chow et al., 2018) .
In RSs, the admissible actions are often random functions of the state (Boutilier et al., 2018) .
In such cases, it is non-trivial to define policy parameterizations that handle such factors.
On the other hand, value-based algorithms are wellsuited to these settings, providing potential advantage over policy methods.
Moreover, at least with linear function approximation (Melo & Ribeiro, 2007) , under reasonable assumptions, Q-learning converges to optimality, while such optimality guarantees for non-convex policy-based methods are generally limited (Fazel et al., 2018) .
Empirical results also suggest that value-based methods are more data-efficient and less sensitive to hyper-parameters (Quillen et al., 2018) .
Of course, with large action spaces, exhaustive action enumeration in value-based algorithms can be expensive--one solution is to represent actions with continuous features (Dulac-Arnold et al., 2015) .
The main challenge in applying value-based algorithms to continuous-action domains is selecting optimal actions (both at training and inference time).
Previous work in this direction falls into three broad categories.
The first solves the inner maximization of the (optimal) Bellman residual loss using global nonlinear optimizers, such as the cross-entropy method (CEM) for QT-Opt (Kalashnikov et al., 2018) , gradient ascent (GA) for actor-expert (Lim et al., 2018) , and action discretization (Uther & Veloso, 1998; Smart & Kaelbling, 2000; Lazaric et al., 2008) .
However, these approaches do not guarantee optimality.
The second approach restricts the Q-function parameterization so that the optimization problem is tractable.
For instance, wire-fitting (Gaskett et al., 1999; III & Klopf, 1993) approximates Q-values piecewise-linearly over a discrete set of points, chosen to ensure the maximum action is one of the extreme points.
The normalized advantage function (NAF) (Gu et al., 2016) constructs the state-action advantage function to be quadratic, hence analytically solvable.
Parameterizing the Q-function with an input-convex neural network (Amos et al., 2017) ensures it is concave.
These restricted functional forms, however, may degrade performance if the domain does not conform to the imposed structure.
The third category replaces optimal Q-values with a "soft" counterpart (Haarnoja et al., 2018) : an entropy regularizer ensures that both the optimal Q-function and policy have closed-form solutions.
However, the sub-optimality gap of this soft policy scales with the interval and dimensionality of the action space (Neu et al., 2017) .
Motivated by the shortcomings of prior approaches, we propose Continuous Action Q-learning (CAQL), a Q-learning framework for continuous actions in which the Q-function is modeled by a generic feed-forward neural network.
1 Our contribution is three-fold.
First, we develop the CAQL framework, which minimizes the Bellman residual in Q-learning using one of several "plug-andplay" action optimizers.
We show that "max-Q" optimization, when the Q-function is approximated by a deep ReLU network, can be formulated as a mixed-integer program (MIP) that solves max-Q optimally.
When the Q-function has sufficient representation power, MIP-based optimization induces better policies and is more robust than methods (e.g., CEM, GA) that approximate the max-Q solution.
Second, to improve CAQL's practicality for larger-scale applications, we develop three speed-up techniques for computing max-Q values:
(i) dynamic tolerance;
(ii) dual filtering; and
(iii) clustering.
Third, we compare CAQL with several state-of-the-art RL algorithms on several benchmark problems with varying degrees of action constraints.
Value-based CAQL is generally competitive, and outperforms policy-based methods in heavily constrained environments, sometimes significantly.
We also study the effects of our speed-ups through ablation analysis.
We proposed Continuous Action Q-learning (CAQL), a general framework for handling continuous actions in value-based RL, in which the Q-function is parameterized by a neural network.
While generic nonlinear optimizers can be naturally integrated with CAQL, we illustrated how the inner maximization of Q-learning can be formulated as mixed-integer programming when the Qfunction is parameterized with a ReLU network.
CAQL (with action function learning) is a general Q-learning framework that includes many existing value-based methods such as QT-Opt and actorexpert.
Using several benchmarks with varying degrees of action constraint, we showed that the policy learned by CAQL-MIP generally outperforms those learned by CAQL-GA and CAQL-CEM; and CAQL is competitive with several state-of-the-art policy-based RL algorithms, and often outperforms them (and is more robust) in heavily-constrained environments.
Future work includes: extending CAQL to the full batch learning setting, in which the optimal Q-function is trained using only offline data; speeding up the MIP computation of the max-Q problem to make CAQL more scalable; and applying CAQL to real-world RL problems.

assistant: text: A general framework of value-based reinforcement learning for continuous control