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Title: Discrete Sequential Prediction of Continuous Actions for Deep RL

Paper content:
It has long been assumed that high dimensional continuous control problems cannot be solved effectively by discretizing individual dimensions of the action space due to the exponentially large number of bins over which policies would have to be learned.
In this paper, we draw inspiration from the recent success of sequence-to-sequence models for structured prediction problems to develop policies over discretized spaces.
Central to this method is the realization that complex functions over high dimensional spaces can be modeled by neural networks that predict one dimension at a time.
Specifically, we show how Q-values and policies over continuous spaces can be modeled using a next step prediction model over discretized dimensions.
With this parameterization, it is possible to both leverage the compositional structure of action spaces during learning, as well as compute maxima over action spaces (approximately).
On a simple example task we demonstrate empirically that our method can perform global search, which effectively gets around the local optimization issues that plague DDPG.
We apply the technique to off-policy (Q-learning) methods and show that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art for off-policy methods on several continuous control tasks.
Reinforcement learning has long been considered as a general framework applicable to a broad range of problems.
However, the approaches used to tackle discrete and continuous action spaces have been fundamentally different.
In discrete domains, algorithms such as Q-learning leverage backups through Bellman equations and dynamic programming to solve problems effectively.
These strategies have led to the use of deep neural networks to learn policies and value functions that can achieve superhuman accuracy in several games (Mnih et al., 2013; where actions lie in discrete domains.
This success spurred the development of RL techniques that use deep neural networks for continuous control problems BID12 BID20 .
The gains in these domains, however, have not been as outsized as they have been for discrete action domains.This disparity is, in part, a result of the inherent difficulty in maximizing an arbitrary function on a continuous domain, even in low-dimensional settings.
Furthermore, it becomes harder to apply dynamic programming methods to back up value function estimates from successor states to parent states in continuous control problems.
Several of the recent continuous control reinforcement learning approaches attempt to borrow characteristics from discrete problems by proposing models that allow maximization and backups more easily BID12 .One
way in which continuous control can avail itself of the above advantages is to discretize each of the dimensions of continuous control action spaces. As
noted in , doing this naively, however, would create an exponentially large discrete space of actions. For
example with M dimensions being discretized into N bins, the problem would balloon to a discrete space with M N possible actions.We leverage the recent success of sequence-to-sequence type models BID32 to train such discretized models, without falling into the trap of requiring an exponentially large number of actions. Our
method relies on a technique that was first introduced in BID3 , which allows us to escape the curse of dimensionality in high dimensional spaces by modeling complicated probability distributions using the chain rule decomposition. In
this paper, we similarly parameterize functions of interest -Q-values -using a decomposition of the joint function into a sequence of conditional values tied together with the bellman operator. With
this formulation, we are able to achieve fine-grained discretization of individual domains, without an explosion in the number of parameters; at the same time we can model arbitrarily complex distributions while maintaining the ability to perform (approximate) global maximization. These
benefits come at the cost of shifting the exponentially complex action space into an exponentially complex MDP BID5 BID10 . In many
settings, however, there are relationships between transitions that can be leveraged and large regions of good solutions, which means that this exponential space need not be fully explored. Existing
work using neural networks to perform approximate exponential search is evidence of this BID37 ; BID2 .While this
strategy can be applied to most function approximation settings in RL, we focus on off-policy settings with an algorithm akin to DQN. Empirical
results on an illustrative multimodal problem demonstrates how our model is able to perform global maximization, avoiding the exploration problems faced by algorithms like NAF BID13 and DDPG . We also show
the effectiveness of our method on a range of benchmark continuous control problems from hopper to humanoid.
Conceptually, our approach centers on the idea that action selection at each stage can be factored and sequentially selected.
In this work we use 1-D action spaces that are discretized as our base component.
Existing work in the image modeling domain suggests that using a mixture of logistic units BID25 greatly speeds up training and would also satisfy our need for a closed form max.
Additionally, this work imposes a prespecified ordering of actions which may negatively impact training for certain classes of problems (with much larger number of action dimensions).
To address this, we could learn to factor the action space into the sequential order for continuous action spaces or learn to group action sets for discrete action spaces.
Another promising direction is to combine this approximate max action with gradient based optimization procedure.
This would relieve some of the complexity of the modeling task of the maxing network, at the cost of increased compute when sampling from the policy.
Finally, the work presented here is exclusively on off-policy methods.
We chose to focus on these methods due to their sample efficiency.
Use of an sequential policies with discretized actions could also be used as the policy for any stochastic policy optimization algorithm such as TRPO BID27 or A3C (Mnih et al., 2016) .
In this work we present a continuous control algorithm that utilize discretized action spaces and sequential models.
The technique we propose is an off-policy RL algorithm that utilizes sequential prediction and discretization.
We decompose our model into a hierarchy of Q function.
The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated on illustrative and benchmark tasks, as well as on more complex continuous control tasks.
Sampling an Action

assistant: text: A method to do Q-learning on continuous action spaces by predicting a sequence of discretized 1-D actions.