Research map / Reinforcement learning / Visual and representation RL
Policy Information Capacity: Information-Theoretic Measure for Task Complexity in Deep Reinforcement Learning
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Measured effects reported in the paper
| What was changed | Where | Measured | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use POIC rather than reward marginal entropy as the solvability indicator | RL benchmark environments · OpenAI Gym, MuJoCo, and DM Control benchmarks | Pearson correlation with algorithm-based normalized score: -0.349 -> 0.807 | Helped |
| Use POIC rather than return variance as the solvability indicator | RL benchmark environments · OpenAI Gym, MuJoCo, and DM Control benchmarks | Pearson correlation with algorithm-based normalized score: 0.372 -> 0.807 | Helped |
| Use PIC rather than return variance as the solvability indicator | RL benchmark environments · OpenAI Gym, MuJoCo, and DM Control benchmarks | Pearson correlation with random-sampling-based normalized score: 0.314 -> 0.401 | Helped |
| Increase the synthetic MDP horizon from T=1 to T=3 | Synthetic MDP · Synthetic MDP | Normalized Score: 0.451 -> 0.112 | Hurt |
| Increase the synthetic MDP horizon from T=1 to T=3 | Synthetic MDP · Synthetic MDP | PIC: 0.087 -> 0.050 | Hurt |
| Increase the synthetic MDP horizon from T=1 to T=3 | Synthetic MDP · Synthetic MDP | POIC: 0.087 -> 0.049 | Hurt |
| Use a high-POIC initial policy-parameter prior (μ=0) rather than low-POIC priors | Evolution Strategies · Synthetic MDP, T=3 | Learning speed | Helped |
| Use a high-PIC initial policy-parameter prior (μ=0) rather than low-PIC priors | Evolution Strategies · Synthetic MDP, T=3 | Learning speed | Helped |
| Use PIC as the metric instead of marginal reward entropy | Policy-parameter priors · Synthetic MDP, T=3 | Pearson correlation with normalized score: R=0.95; R=0.78; marginal entropy R=0.99; R=-0.83 | Helped |
| Use POIC as the metric instead of marginal optimality entropy | Policy-parameter priors · Synthetic MDP, T=3 | Pearson correlation with normalized score: R=0.94; R=0.69; marginal entropy R=0.99; R=-0.82 | Helped |
| Choose reward shaping with smooth L1 or L2 distance rewards rather than Fraction or Sparse rewards | Reacher and Pointmaze · Reacher and Pointmaze | Robustness to reward hyper-parameters | Helped |
Closest papers by meaning
- Rethinking Model-based, Policy-based, and Value-based Reinforcement Learning via the Lens of Representation Complexity (NeurIPS 2024 · similarity 0.88)
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