Agent skill
rl-policy-optimization
Best practices for reinforcement learning policy optimization. Use when working on RL agents, PPO, SAC, or reward design.
Install this agent skill to your Project
npx add-skill https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw/tree/main/researchclaw/skills/builtin/domain/rl-policy-optimization
Metadata
Additional technical details for this skill
- author
- researchclaw
- version
- 1.0
- category
- domain
- priority
- 3
- references
- Schulman et al., Proximal Policy Optimization, 2017; Haarnoja et al., Soft Actor-Critic, ICML 2018
- trigger keywords
- reinforcement learning,rl,policy,reward,agent,environment,ppo,sac
- applicable stages
- 9,10
SKILL.md
RL Policy Optimization Best Practice
Algorithm selection:
- Discrete actions: PPO, DQN, A2C
- Continuous actions: SAC, TD3, PPO
- Multi-agent: MAPPO, QMIX
- Offline: CQL, IQL, Decision Transformer
Training recipe:
- PPO: clip=0.2, lr=3e-4, gamma=0.99, GAE lambda=0.95
- SAC: lr=3e-4, tau=0.005, auto-tune alpha
- Use vectorized environments (e.g., gymnasium.vector)
- Normalize observations and rewards
- Log episode return, episode length, value loss, policy entropy
Evaluation:
- Report mean +/- std over 10+ evaluation episodes
- Use deterministic policy for evaluation
- Compare against random policy and simple baselines
- Report sample efficiency (return vs. env steps)
Common pitfalls:
- Reward shaping can introduce bias
- Seed sensitivity is HIGH — use 5+ seeds
- Hyperparameter sensitivity — do a small sweep
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