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Procedural Level Generation Improves Generality of Deep Reinforcement Learning (arxiv.org)
1 point by togelius on Jun 29, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of one fixed game level, the agent trains on endless automatically made levels so it can't memorize one layout. Unlike fixed-level training, it handled new levels from the same generator, and matching difficulty to its skill needed less training.

Abstract · Illuminating Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning through Procedural Level Generation

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown impressive results in a variety of domains, learning directly from high-dimensional sensory streams. However, when neural networks are trained in a fixed environment, such as a single level in a video game, they will usually overfit and fail to generalize to new levels. When RL models overfit, even slight modifications to the environment can result in poor agent performance. This paper explores how procedurally generated levels during training can increase generality. We show that for some games procedural level generation enables generalization to new levels within the same distribution. Additionally, it is possible to achieve better performance with less data by manipulating the difficulty of the levels in response to the performance of the agent. The generality of the learned behaviors is also evaluated on a set of human-designed levels. The results suggest that the ability to generalize to human-designed levels highly depends on the design of the level generators. We apply dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques to visualize the generators' distributions of levels and analyze to what degree they can produce levels similar to those designed by a human.

Niels Justesen, Ruben Rodriguez Torrado, Philip Bontrager, Ahmed Khalifa, Julian Togelius, Sebastian Risi
arXiv:1806.10729 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Jun 28, 2018 · updated Nov 29, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to NeurIPS Deep RL Workshop 2018

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