TOWARDS DEPLOYMENT-EFFICIENT REINFORCEMENT LEARNING: LOWER BOUND AND OPTIMALITY

Jiawei Huang, Jinglin Chen, Li Zhao, Tao Qin, Nan Jiang, Tie Yan Liu

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Deployment efficiency is an important criterion for many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite the community's increasing interest, there lacks a formal theoretical formulation for the problem. In this paper, we propose such a formulation for deployment-efficient RL (DE-RL) from an “optimization with constraints” perspective: we are interested in exploring an MDP and obtaining a near-optimal policy within minimal deployment complexity, whereas in each deployment the policy can sample a large batch of data. Using finite-horizon linear MDPs as a concrete structural model, we reveal the fundamental limit in achieving deployment efficiency by establishing information-theoretic lower bounds, and provide algorithms that achieve the optimal deployment efficiency. Moreover, our formulation for DE-RL is flexible and can serve as a building block for other practically relevant settings; we give “Safe DE-RL” and “Sample-Efficient DE-RL” as two examples, which may be worth future investigation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2022
Event10th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2022 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Apr 25 2022Apr 29 2022

Conference

Conference10th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2022
CityVirtual, Online
Period4/25/224/29/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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

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