Hyper: Hyperparameter Robust Efficient Exploration in Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

The exploration & exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate extensive hyperparameter tuning on different environments, which heavily limits the applicability and accessibility of this line of methods. In this paper, we characterize this problem via analysis of the agent behavior, concluding the fundamental difficulty of choosing a proper hyperparameter. We then identify the difficulty and the instability of the optimization when the agent learns with curiosity. We propose our method, hyperparameter robust exploration (Hyper), which extensively mitigates the problem by effectively regularizing the visitation of the exploration and decoupling the exploitation to ensure stable training. We theoretically justify that Hyper is provably efficient under function approximation setting and empirically demonstrate its appealing performance and robustness in various environments.