stable-baselines3-contrib [Feature Request] Hybrid PPO

🚀 Feature

Hello, in accordance with DLR-RM/stable-baselines3#1624, @SimRey and I would like to implement Hybrid PPO in this library. This is the paper that introduced it.

Motivation

@SimRey had to implement it for his thesis, so we thought I'd be nice to have in this library, especially as it's one of the only (or most popular) options when both discrete and continuous actions as necessary. A number of problems in chemical engineering are starting to explore reinforcement learning as a solution approach, and in many cases both discrete and continuous actions are needed.

Pitch

Implement a new algorithm (subclass of PPO or MaskablePPO) with corresponding network architecture that outputs both discrete and continuous actions.

Alternatives

The Hybrid PPO algorithm needs to perform 2 backward steps: one on the discrete actions (with frozen weights on the continuous actions part of the net), and one on the continuous actions (with frozen weights on the discrete actions part of the net). To me it looks like the only option is to subclass PPO or MaskablePPO and override some methods.

Also the network architecture needs to have 2 outputs, like actor-critic but with different meaning of the outputs (also, the "critic" part could have a dimension > 1).