In plain words: The network splits into two parts: one rates how good a situation is overall, the other how much each action beats the average action. This helps it judge actions better when many are nearly equal in value, and it beat the best Atari agent.
Abstract · Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
In recent years there have been many successes of using deep representations in reinforcement learning. Still, many of these applications use conventional architectures, such as convolutional networks, LSTMs, or auto-encoders. In this paper, we present a new neural network architecture for model-free reinforcement learning. Our dueling network represents two separate estimators: one for the state value function and one for the state-dependent action advantage function. The main benefit of this factoring is to generalize learning across actions without imposing any change to the underlying reinforcement learning algorithm. Our results show that this architecture leads to better policy evaluation in the presence of many similar-valued actions. Moreover, the dueling architecture enables our RL agent to outperform the state-of-the-art on the Atari 2600 domain.
Ziyu Wang, Tom Schaul, Matteo Hessel, Hado van Hasselt, Marc Lanctot, Nando de Freitas
arXiv:1511.06581 · cs.LG · submitted Nov 20, 2015 · updated Apr 5, 2016
abstract · pdf · html · 15 pages, 5 figures, and 5 tables