about
Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks (arxiv.org)
2 points by floydsoft on Nov 17, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Besides chasing the game's real score, the agent practices self-invented goals sharing one internal picture of the world, with a switch that steers that picture toward what earns points. On 3D maze games it learned 10 times faster than the usual reward-only setup.

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved state-of-the-art results by directly maximising cumulative reward. However, environments contain a much wider variety of possible training signals. In this paper, we introduce an agent that also maximises many other pseudo-reward functions simultaneously by reinforcement learning. All of these tasks share a common representation that, like unsupervised learning, continues to develop in the absence of extrinsic rewards. We also introduce a novel mechanism for focusing this representation upon extrinsic rewards, so that learning can rapidly adapt to the most relevant aspects of the actual task. Our agent significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on Atari, averaging 880\% expert human performance, and a challenging suite of first-person, three-dimensional \emph{Labyrinth} tasks leading to a mean speedup in learning of 10$\times$ and averaging 87\% expert human performance on Labyrinth.

Max Jaderberg, Volodymyr Mnih, Wojciech Marian Czarnecki, Tom Schaul, Joel Z Leibo, David Silver, Koray Kavukcuoglu
arXiv:1611.05397 · cs.LG, cs.NE · submitted Nov 16, 2016
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN
Also discussed: Nov 2016 (47 points, 6 comments)