Evaluation-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Policy evaluation is a core component of many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms and a critical tool for ensuring safe deployment of RL policies. However, existing policy evaluation methods often suffer from high variance or bias. To address these issues, we introduce Evaluation-Aware Reinforcement Learning (EvA-RL), a general policy learning framework that considers evaluation accuracy at train-time, as opposed to standard post-hoc policy evaluation methods. Specifically, EvA-RL directly optimizes policies for efficient and accurate evaluation, in addition to being performant. We provide an instantiation of EvA-RL and demonstrate through a combination of theoretical analysis and empirical results that EvA-RL effectively trades off between evaluation accuracy and expected return. Finally, we show that the evaluation-aware policy and the evaluation mechanism itself can be co-learned to mitigate this tradeoff, providing the evaluation benefits without significantly sacrificing policy performance. This work opens a new line of research that elevates reliable evaluation to a first-class principle in reinforcement learning.