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Hybrid Reward Architecture for Reinforcement Learning (arxiv.org)
3 points by jonbaer on Jun 19, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of one network learning a game's total score, this splits the reward into pieces and learns a separate score estimate for each, then adds them up. On Ms. Pac-Man it played better than a human, while the usual single-network setup struggles.

Abstract

One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is generalisation. In typical deep RL methods this is achieved by approximating the optimal value function with a low-dimensional representation using a deep network. While this approach works well in many domains, in domains where the optimal value function cannot easily be reduced to a low-dimensional representation, learning can be very slow and unstable. This paper contributes towards tackling such challenging domains, by proposing a new method, called Hybrid Reward Architecture (HRA). HRA takes as input a decomposed reward function and learns a separate value function for each component reward function. Because each component typically only depends on a subset of all features, the corresponding value function can be approximated more easily by a low-dimensional representation, enabling more effective learning. We demonstrate HRA on a toy-problem and the Atari game Ms. Pac-Man, where HRA achieves above-human performance.

Harm van Seijen, Mehdi Fatemi, Joshua Romoff, Romain Laroche, Tavian Barnes, Jeffrey Tsang
arXiv:1706.04208 · cs.LG · submitted Jun 13, 2017 · updated Nov 28, 2017
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