On-Policy Algorithms for Continual Reinforcement Learning (Student Abstract)

Abstract Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) is the study of optimal strategies for maximizing rewards in sequential environments that change over time. This is particularly crucial in domains such as robotics, where the operational environment is inherently dynamic and subject to continual change. Nevertheless, research in this area has thus far concentrated on off-policy algorithms with replay buffers that are capable of amortizing the impact of distribution shifts. Such an approach is not feasible with on-policy reinforcement learning algorithms that learn solely from the data obtained from the current policy. In this paper, we examine the performance of proximal policy optimization (PPO), a prevalent on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, in a classical CRL benchmark. Our findings suggest that the current methods are suboptimal in terms of average performance. Nevertheless, they demonstrate encouraging competitive outcomes with respect to forward transfer and forgetting metrics. This highlights the need for further research into continual on-policy reinforcement learning. The source code is available at https://github.com/Teddy298/continualworld-ppo.