High-throughput Sampling, Communicating and Training for Reinforcement Learning Systems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms require large amounts of computational resources and time to train due to the simultaneous model training and real-time interactions with simulation environments. This results in an RL algorithm's training time potentially exceeding days to months. We present HRL, a comprehensive optimization system designed to improve the system throughput of RL algorithms. HRL addresses the challenges of discovering and identifying bottlenecks in the sampling, training, or communication stages and promptly improving their performance. We propose a group-parallel pipeline method to improve the sampling efficiency and apply data quantization and multi-learner training to resolve the network and learning bottlenecks. The HRL system has been fully implemented and integrated with XingTian. The results of the experiments show that the HRL system can improve the throughput by 18.6%-90.6%.