---

name: qdagger_loss description: Compute the QDagger objective for policy-to-value reincarnating RL using n-step TD loss plus teacher-policy distillation.

QDagger Loss

When To Use

Use this skill when implementing or validating a reduced or full QDagger-style policy-to-value reincarnating RL experiment. It is appropriate when you have transition records, student Q-values, and teacher action probabilities. Do not use it as a standalone imitation-only objective; the TD and distillation terms must remain separately visible.

Inputs

• q_values: mapping from state ids to action-value lists.
• transitions: records with state, action, n_step_return, discount, next_max_q, and teacher_policy.
• temperature: positive softmax temperature for deriving the student policy from Q-values.
• lambda_t: current distillation coefficient.

Outputs

• td_loss: mean squared Bellman error.
• distillation_loss: mean teacher cross-entropy against the student softmax policy.
• combined_loss: td_loss + lambda_t * distillation_loss.
• examples: per-transition targets, predictions, and loss terms.

Workflow

1. Validate that every transition has a known state, valid action index, and normalized teacher policy.
2. Compute each n-step TD target as n_step_return + discount * next_max_q.
3. Compute mean squared TD loss over selected actions.
4. Convert each student Q-vector into softmax(q / temperature).
5. Compute teacher-policy cross-entropy.
6. Return both component losses and the combined QDagger loss.

Validation

Run:

python scripts/qdagger_loss.py --self-test
python tests/test_qdagger_loss.py

Limitations

This implementation is deterministic and dependency-free. It is intended for recovery harnesses, tests, and small tabular/scalar checks, not high-throughput deep RL training.