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Poster

EvoRainbow: Combining Improvements in Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning for Policy Search

Pengyi Li · Jianye Hao · Hongyao Tang · Xian Fu · Yan Zheng


Abstract:

Both Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in policy search with different principles. A promising direction is to combine the respective advantages of both for efficient policy optimization. To this end, many works have proposed various mechanisms to integrate EAs and RL. However, it is still unclear which of these mechanisms are complementary and can be fully combined. In this paper, we revisit the different mechanisms from five perspectives: 1) Interaction Mode, 2) Individual Architecture, 3) EAs and operators, 4) Impact of EA on RL, and 5) Fitness Surrogate and Usage. We evaluate the effectiveness of each mechanism and experimentally analyze the reasons for the more effective mechanisms. Using the most effective mechanisms, we develop EvoRainbow and EvoRainbow-Exp, which achieve superior performance on various tasks with distinct characteristics.

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