Policy optimization by genetic distillation

Tanmay Gangwani, Jian Peng

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Genetic algorithms have been widely used in many practical optimization problems. Inspired by natural selection, operators, including mutation, crossover and selection, provide effective heuristics for search and black-box optimization. However, they have not been shown useful for deep reinforcement learning, possibly due to the catastrophic consequence of parameter crossovers of neural networks. Here, we present Genetic Policy Optimization (GPO), a new genetic algorithm for sample-efficient deep policy optimization. GPO uses imitation learning for policy crossover in the state space and applies policy gradient methods for mutation. Our experiments on MuJoCo tasks show that GPO as a genetic algorithm is able to provide superior performance over the state-of-the-art policy gradient methods and achieves comparable or higher sample efficiency.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2018
Event6th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2018 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Apr 30 2018May 3 2018

Conference

Conference6th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period4/30/185/3/18

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Education
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Policy optimization by genetic distillation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this