Rethinking Value Function Learning for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

Our work focuses on training RL agents on multiple visually diverse environments to improve observational generalization performance. In prior methods, policy and value networks are separately optimized using a disjoint network architecture to avoid interference and obtain a more accurate value function. We identify that a value network in the multi-environment setting is more challenging to optimize and prone to memorizing the training data than in the conventional single-environment setting. In addition, we find that appropriate regularization on the value network is necessary to improve both training and test performance. To this end, we propose Delayed-Critic Policy Gradient (DCPG), a policy gradient algorithm that implicitly penalizes value estimates by optimizing the value network less frequently with more training data than the policy network.