One-Shot Averaging for Distributed TD($\lambda$) Under Markov Sampling

Autor: Tian, Haoxing, Paschalidis, Ioannis Ch., Olshevsky, Alex
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
Popis: We consider a distributed setup for reinforcement learning, where each agent has a copy of the same Markov Decision Process but transitions are sampled from the corresponding Markov chain independently by each agent. We show that in this setting, we can achieve a linear speedup for TD($\lambda$), a family of popular methods for policy evaluation, in the sense that $N$ agents can evaluate a policy $N$ times faster provided the target accuracy is small enough. Notably, this speedup is achieved by ``one shot averaging,'' a procedure where the agents run TD($\lambda$) with Markov sampling independently and only average their results after the final step. This significantly reduces the amount of communication required to achieve a linear speedup relative to previous work.
Databáze: arXiv