In plain words: They stacked six separate upgrades to a game-playing AI that learns by trial and error, then tested which ones help each other. Together they beat every single upgrade alone, learning faster and reaching higher scores on Atari games.
Abstract
The deep reinforcement learning community has made several independent improvements to the DQN algorithm. However, it is unclear which of these extensions are complementary and can be fruitfully combined. This paper examines six extensions to the DQN algorithm and empirically studies their combination. Our experiments show that the combination provides state-of-the-art performance on the Atari 2600 benchmark, both in terms of data efficiency and final performance. We also provide results from a detailed ablation study that shows the contribution of each component to overall performance.
Matteo Hessel, Joseph Modayil, Hado van Hasselt, Tom Schaul, Georg Ostrovski, Will Dabney, Dan Horgan, Bilal Piot, Mohammad Azar, David Silver
arXiv:1710.02298 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Oct 6, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · Under review as a conference paper at AAAI 2018