2018

Dual Policy Iteration

Sun, Wen, Gordon, Geoffrey J., Boots, Byron et al.

Understand

Recently, a novel class of Approximate Policy Iteration (API) algorithms have demonstrated impressive practical performance (e.g., ExIt from [2], AlphaGo-Zero from [27]).

  • This new family of algorithms maintains, and alternately optimizes, two policies: a fast, reactive policy (e.g., a deep neural network) deployed at test time, and a slow, non-reactive policy (e.g., Tree Search), that can plan multiple steps ahead.
  • The reactive policy is updated under supervision from the non-reactive policy, while the non-reactive policy is improved with guidance from the reactive policy.
  • In this work we study this Dual Policy Iteration (DPI) strategy in an alternating optimization framework and provide a convergence analysis that extends existing API theory.

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