An Empirical Study of Reinforcement Learning Scaling Laws

Abstract

The discovery of scaling laws enables prediction of the performance, the optimal resource allocation strategy, and the best hyperparameter configuration of a large-scale training job based on inexpensive experiments at smaller scales. Guided by these empirical scaling laws, the deep learning community has achieved great success in training large (self-)supervised models on Internet-scale datasets. In contrast, despite its potential and wide application, reinforcement learning (RL) has yet to find a guiding principle for predictable scaling. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of RL scaling laws of an actor-critic algorithm in two procedurally generated environments, Starpilot and Craftax. We discover empirical scaling laws with strong predictive performance in both environments. The discovered scaling laws accurately predict the aforementioned three quantities for larger-scale training jobs up to two orders of magnitude in total training compute. In particular, we employ a variant of Elo scores for the single-agent RL paradigm as an alternative performance metric than the commonly used mean episode return. Our results show that the Elo score is a much more predictable metric than the mean episode return, making it a better choice for fitting scaling laws. By applying our discovered scaling laws to increase training compute, we establish a new state of the art in the challenging Craftax environment. Beneath the surface of the global scaling trend, we also observe a non-monotonic scaling pattern of the compute-optimal model size in Craftax. We connect this observation to a pathology known as Ray interference.