Pick up the PACE: A Parameter-Free Optimizer for Lifelong Reinforcement Learning

A key challenge in lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) is the loss of plasticity, where previous learning progress hinders an agent's adaptation to new tasks. While regularization and resetting can help, they require precise hyperparameter selection at the outset and environment-dependent adjustments. Building on the principled theory of online convex optimization, we present a parameter-free optimizer for lifelong RL, called PACE, which requires no tuning or prior knowledge about the distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on Procgen, Atari, and Gym Control environments show that PACE works surprisingly well$\unicode{x2013}$mitigating loss of plasticity and rapidly adapting to challenging distribution shifts$\unicode{x2013}$despite the underlying optimization problem being nonconvex and nonstationary.