Phasic Diversity Optimization for Population-Based Reinforcement Learning

Reviewing the previous work of diversity Reinforcement Learning, diversity is often obtained via an augmented loss function, which requires a balance between reward and diversity. Generally, diversity optimization algorithms use Multi-armed Bandits algorithms to select the coefficient in the pre-defined space. However, the dynamic distribution of reward signals for MABs or the conflict between quality and diversity limits the performance of these methods. We introduce the Phasic Diversity Optimization (PDO) algorithm, a Population-Based Training framework that separates reward and diversity training into distinct phases instead of optimizing a multi-objective function. In the auxiliary phase, agents with poor performance diversified via determinants will not replace the better agents in the archive. The decoupling of reward and diversity allows us to use an aggressive diversity optimization in the auxiliary phase without performance degradation. Furthermore, we construct a dogfight scenario for aerial agents to demonstrate the practicality of the PDO algorithm. We introduce two implementations of PDO archive and conduct tests in the newly proposed adversarial dogfight and MuJoCo simulations. The results show that our proposed algorithm achieves better performance than baselines.