Federated Reinforcement Learning with Environment Heterogeneity
We study a Federated Reinforcement Learning (FedRL) problem in which n agents collaboratively learn a single policy without sharing the trajectories they collected during agent-environment interaction. We stress the constraint of environment heterogeneity, which means n environments corresponding to these n agents have different state transitions. To obtain a value function or a policy function which optimizes the overall performance in all environments, we propose two federated RL algorithms, and . We theoretically prove that these algorithms converge to suboptimal solutions, while such suboptimality depends on how heterogeneous these n environments are. Moreover, we propose a heuristic that achieves personalization by embedding the n environments into n vectors. The personalization heuristic not only improves the training but also allows for better generalization to new environments.
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