Kevin Wang discusses the computational efficiency of their 1000-layer self-supervised RL network paper presented at NeurIPS.
Insight
Kevin Wang: Cross-entropy trajectory classification enables scalable deep reinforcement learning
“I think it's because we're fundamentally shifting the burden of learning from something like, Q-learning or, like, regressing to, like, TD errors, which we know is quite spurious and noisy and biased, to fundamentally, like, a classification problem. We're try…”
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Wang: Deep Self-Supervised Method Beats SOTA on Goal-Conditioned RL Significantly
“We do achieve state-of-the-art performance on goal-conditioned RL and Jack's CCRL by a significant amount.”
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Kevin Wang: Scaling RL network depth unlocks effective batch size scaling
“We notice that we see that scaling width actually also improves performance, and we also find that actually by scaling depth, we actually unlock the ability to scale along batch size as well.”
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Wang: Traditional value-based reinforcement learning fails to scale
“And so what we did is that we know that traditional RL, like let's say like value value-based RL doesn't really scale, right? This is pretty clear from the literature.”
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Wang: 64 layers saturate performance in most reinforcement learning tasks
“Within our paper, like, for most environments we are able to, like, saturate, like, get to, like, almost perfect performance within just, you know, we don't even need to get to, like, a thousand layers. Like, maybe just 64 layers, for example, is sufficient.”
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Wang: GPU environments collect hundreds of millions of RL timesteps hourly
“With these, like, GPU accelerated environments, we can collect hundreds of millions of time steps of data within just a few hours”