In plain words: The agent keeps several guesses about how good each action is and follows one guess for a whole episode, so it sticks to a promising plan instead of adding random actions like the usual approach. It learned faster and scored higher on most Atari games.
Abstract
Efficient exploration in complex environments remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. We propose bootstrapped DQN, a simple algorithm that explores in a computationally and statistically efficient manner through use of randomized value functions. Unlike dithering strategies such as epsilon-greedy exploration, bootstrapped DQN carries out temporally-extended (or deep) exploration; this can lead to exponentially faster learning. We demonstrate these benefits in complex stochastic MDPs and in the large-scale Arcade Learning Environment. Bootstrapped DQN substantially improves learning times and performance across most Atari games.
Ian Osband, Charles Blundell, Alexander Pritzel, Benjamin Van Roy
arXiv:1602.04621 · cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SY, stat.ML · submitted Feb 15, 2016 · updated Jul 4, 2016
abstract · pdf · html