Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from three core difficulties: temporal credit assignment with sparse rewards, lack of effective exploration, and brittle convergence properties that are extremely sensitive to hyperparameters. Collectively, these challenges severely limit the applicability of these approaches to real world problems. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), a class of black box optimization techniques inspired by natural evolution, are well suited to address each of these three challenges. However, EAs typically suffer with high sample complexity and struggle to solve problems that require optimization of a large number of parameters. In this paper, we introduce Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL), a hybrid algorithm that leverages the population of an EA to provide diversified data to train an RL agent, and reinserts the RL agent into the EA population periodically to inject gradient information into the EA. ERL inherits EA's ability of temporal credit assignment with a fitness metric, effective exploration with a diverse set of policies, and stability of a population-based approach and complements it with off-policy DRL's ability to leverage gradients for higher sample efficiency and faster learning. Experiments in a range of challenging continuous control benchmark tasks demonstrate that ERL significantly outperforms prior DRL and EA methods, achieving state-of-the-art performances.

本文介绍了一种基于人工进化算法和深度强化学习相结合的进化增强学习算法，该算法克服了传统深度强化学习算法中时序资格分配、探索效率和收敛性极度敏感的问题，使用基于种群的进化算法来训练深度强化学习代理人，实验结果表明，该方法在多种连续控制基准测试中显著优于传统深度强化学习和进化算法方法。

演化引导的强化学习策略梯度