Y. Cheng, L. Chen, C. L. P. Chen and X. Wang, Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning Based on Steffensen Value Iteration, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 1023-1032, Dec. 2021 DOI: 10.1109/TCDS.2020.3034452.
As an important machine learning method, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been rapidly developed in recent years and has achieved breakthrough results in many fields, such as video games, natural language processing, and robot control. However, due to the inherit trial-and-error learning mechanism of reinforcement learning and the time-consuming training of deep neural network itself, the convergence speed of DRL is very slow and consequently limits the real applications of DRL. In this article, aiming to improve the convergence speed of DRL, we proposed a novel Steffensen value iteration (SVI) method by applying the Steffensen iteration to the value function iteration of off-policy DRL from the perspective of fixed-point iteration. The proposed SVI is theoretically proved to be convergent and have a faster convergence speed than Bellman value iteration. The proposed SVI has versatility, which can be easily combined with existing off-policy RL algorithms. In this article, we proposed two speedy off-policy DRLs by combining SVI with DDQN and TD3, respectively, namely, SVI-DDQN and SVI-TD3. Experiments on several discrete-action and continuous-action tasks from the Atari 2600 and MuJoCo platforms demonstrated that our proposed SVI-based DRLs can achieve higher average reward in a shorter time than the comparative algorithm.