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Is Deep Reinforcement Learning Superhuman on Atari? (arxiv.org)
1 point by ArtWomb on Aug 14, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Tiny changes to Atari game settings can swing scores, so this benchmark fixes those settings and standardizes training and testing rules for fair comparison. Under these rules, the leading agent did not beat human world records, though a strengthened version set new best scores.

Abstract · Is Deep Reinforcement Learning Really Superhuman on Atari? Leveling the playing field

Consistent and reproducible evaluation of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is not straightforward. In the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), small changes in environment parameters such as stochasticity or the maximum allowed play time can lead to very different performance. In this work, we discuss the difficulties of comparing different agents trained on ALE. In order to take a step further towards reproducible and comparable DRL, we introduce SABER, a Standardized Atari BEnchmark for general Reinforcement learning algorithms. Our methodology extends previous recommendations and contains a complete set of environment parameters as well as train and test procedures. We then use SABER to evaluate the current state of the art, Rainbow. Furthermore, we introduce a human world records baseline, and argue that previous claims of expert or superhuman performance of DRL might not be accurate. Finally, we propose Rainbow-IQN by extending Rainbow with Implicit Quantile Networks (IQN) leading to new state-of-the-art performance. Source code is available for reproducibility.

Marin Toromanoff, Emilie Wirbel, Fabien Moutarde
arXiv:1908.04683 · cs.AI · submitted Aug 13, 2019 · updated Nov 8, 2019
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