Edge Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient: efficient continuous control for edge scenarios

Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning is gaining increasing attention thanks to its capability to learn complex policies in high-dimensional settings. Recent advancements utilize a dual-network architecture to learn optimal policies through the Q-learning algorithm. However, this approach has notable drawbacks, such as an overestimation bias that can disrupt the learning process and degrade the performance of the resulting policy. To address this, novel algorithms have been developed that mitigate overestimation bias by employing multiple Q-functions. Edge scenarios, which prioritize privacy, have recently gained prominence. In these settings, limited computational resources pose a significant challenge for complex Machine Learning approaches, making the efficiency of algorithms crucial for their performance. In this work, we introduce a novel Reinforcement Learning algorithm tailored for edge scenarios, called Edge Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (EdgeD3). EdgeD3 enhances the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm, achieving significantly improved performance with $25\%$ less Graphics Process Unit (GPU) time while maintaining the same memory usage. Additionally, EdgeD3 consistently matches or surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art methods across various benchmarks, all while using $30\%$ fewer computational resources and requiring $30\%$ less memory.