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PPG

Overview

PPG was proposed in Phasic Policy Gradient. In prior methods, one must choose between using a shared network or separate networks to represent the policy and value function. Using separate networks avoids interference between objectives, while using a shared network allows useful features to be shared. PPG is able to achieve the best of both worlds by splitting optimization into two phases, one that advances training and one that distills features.

Quick Facts

  1. PPG is a model-free and policy-based RL algorithm.

  2. PPG supports both discrete and continuous action spaces.

  3. PPG supports off-policy mode and on-policy mode.

  4. There are two value networks in PPG.

  5. In the implementation of DI-engine, we use two buffers for off-policy PPG, which are only different from maximum data usage limit (data max_use ).

Key Graphs

PPG utilizes disjoint policy and value networks to reduce interference between objectives. The policy network includes an auxiliary value head which is used to distill the knowledge of value into the policy network, the concrete network architecture is shown as follows:

../_images/ppg_net.png

Key Equations

The optimization of PPG alternates between two phases, a policy phase and an auxiliary phase. During the policy phase, the policy network and the value network are updated similar to PPO. During the auxiliary phase, the value knowledge is distilled into the policy network with the joint loss:

\[L^{j o i n t}=L^{a u x}+\beta_{c l o n e} \cdot \hat{\mathbb{E}}_{t}\left[K L\left[\pi_{\theta_{o l d}}\left(\cdot \mid s_{t}\right), \pi_{\theta}\left(\cdot \mid s_{t}\right)\right]\right]\]

The joint loss optimizes the auxiliary objective (distillation) while preserves the original policy with the KL-divergence restriction (i.e. the second item). And the auxiliary loss is defined as:

\[L^{a u x}=\frac{1}{2} \cdot \hat{\mathbb{E}}_{t}\left[\left(V_{\theta_{\pi}}\left(s_{t}\right)-\hat{V}_{t}^{\mathrm{targ}}\right)^{2}\right]\]

Pseudo-code

on-policy training procedure

The following flow charts show how PPG alternates between the policy phase and the auxiliary phase

../_images/PPG.png

Note

During the auxiliary phase, PPG also takes the opportunity to perform additional training on the value network.

off-policy training procedure

DI-engine also implements off-policy PPG with two buffers with different data use constraint (max_use), which policy buffer offers data for policy phase while value buffer provides auxiliary phase’s data. The whole training procedure is similar to off-policy PPO but execute additional auxiliary phase with a fixed frequency.

Extensions

  • PPG can be combined with:

    • GAE or other advantage estimation method

    • Multi-buffer, different max_use

  • PPO (or PPG) + UCB-DrAC + PLR is one of the most powerful methods in procgen environment.

Implementation

The default config is defined as follows:

The network interface PPG used is defined as follows:

Benchmark

Benchmark and comparison of PPG algorithm

environment

best mean reward

evaluation results

config link

comparison
Pong
(PongNoFrameskip-v4)

20

 ../_images/ppg_pong.png

config_link_p
DI-engine PPO off-policy(20)
Qbert
(QbertNoFrameskip-v4)

17775

 ../_images/ppg_qbert.png

config_link_q
DI-engine PPO off-policy(16400)
SpaceInvaders
(SpaceInvadersNoFrame skip-v4)

1213

 ../_images/ppg_spaceinvaders.png

config_link_s
DI-engine PPO off-policy(1200)

References

Karl Cobbe, Jacob Hilton, Oleg Klimov, John Schulman: “Phasic Policy Gradient”, 2020; arXiv:2009.04416.

Other Public Implementations