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Poster

Regularized Q-learning through Robust Averaging

Peter Schmitt-Förster · Tobias Sutter


Abstract:

We propose a new Q-learning variant, called 2RA Q-learning, that addresses some weaknesses of existing Q-learning methods in a principled manner. One such weakness is an underlying estimation bias which cannot be controlled and often results in poor performance. We propose a distributionally robust estimator for the maximum expected value term, which allows us to precisely control the level of estimation bias introduced. The distributionally robust estimator admits a closed-form solution such that the proposed algorithm has a computational cost per iteration comparable to Watkins' Q-learning. For the tabular case, we show that 2RA Q-learning converges to the optimal policy and analyze its asymptotic mean-squared error, which allows us to suggest a reasonable learning rate. Lastly, we conduct numerical experiments for various settings, which corroborate our theoretical findings and indicate that 2RA Q-learning often performs better than existing methods.

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