Average-Reward Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning for Underactuated Double Pendulum Tasks

This report presents a solution for the swing-up and stabilisation tasks of the acrobot and the pendubot, developed for the AI Olympics competition at IROS 2024. Our approach employs the Average-Reward Entropy Advantage Policy Optimization (AR-EAPO), a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that combines average-reward RL and maximum entropy RL. Results demonstrate that our controller achieves improved performance and robustness scores compared to established baseline methods in both the acrobot and pendubot scenarios, without the need for a heavily engineered reward function or system model. The current results are applicable exclusively to the simulation stage setup.

Maximum Entropy On-Policy Actor-Critic via Entropy Advantage Estimation

Entropy Regularisation is a widely adopted technique that enhances policy optimisation performance and stability. A notable form of entropy regularisation is augmenting the objective with an entropy term, thereby simultaneously optimising the expected return and the entropy. This framework, known as maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MaxEnt RL), has shown theoretical and empirical successes. However, its practical application in straightforward on-policy actor-critic settings remains surprisingly underexplored. We hypothesise that this is due to the difficulty of managing the entropy reward in practice. This paper proposes a simple method of separating the entropy objective from the MaxEnt RL objective, which facilitates the implementation of MaxEnt RL in on-policy settings. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that extending Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) and Trust Region Policy Optimisation (TRPO) within the MaxEnt framework improves policy optimisation performance in both MuJoCo and Procgen tasks. Additionally, our results highlight MaxEnt RL's capacity to enhance generalisation.

The Bid Picture: Auction-Inspired Multi-player Generative Adversarial Networks Training

This article proposes auction-inspired multi-player generative adversarial networks training, which mitigates the mode collapse problem of GANs. Mode collapse occurs when an over-fitted generator generates a limited range of samples, often concentrating on a small subset of the data distribution. Despite the restricted diversity of generated samples, the discriminator can still be deceived into distinguishing these samples as real samples from the actual distribution. In the absence of external standards, a model cannot recognize its failure during the training phase. We extend the two-player game of generative adversarial networks to the multi-player game. During the training, the values of each model are determined by the bids submitted by other players in an auction-like process.