# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged deep-rl

13

What you are looking for is called "reinforcement learning". A reinforcement learning algorithm will try to maximize a reward function. This reward represents how "good" or "bad" an action is in the actual context. For example, in the snake game, your reward will be positive for eating an apple and negative when the snake hits a ...

9

Here is a table that attempts to systematically show the differences between tabular Q-learning (TQL), deep Q-learning (DQL), and deep Q-network (DQN). Tabular Q-learning (TQL) Deep Q-learning (DQL) Deep Q-network (DQN) Is it an RL algorithm? Yes Yes No (unless you use DQN to refer to DQL, which is done often!) Does it use neural networks? No. It uses a ...

7

There is a relatively recent paper that tackles this issue: Challenges of real-world reinforcement learning (2019) by Gabriel Dulac-Arnold et al., which presents all the challenges that need to be addressed to productionize RL to real world problems, the current approaches/solutions to solve the challenges, and metrics to evaluate them. I will only list them ...

7

You should start with the general definition of Reinforcement Learning problem. And what Markov Decision Process is. DQN, A3C, PPO and REINFORCE are algorithms for solving reinforcement learning problems. These algorithms have their strengths and weaknesses depending on the details of the underlying problem. Multi-Armed Bandit is not even an algorithm - it ...

6

$Q$-learning (and also its deep variant, and most of the other well-known reinforcement learning algorithms) are inherently learning approaches for single-agent environments. The entire problem setting that these algorithms are developed for (Markov decision processes, or MDPs) is always framed in terms of a single agent situated in some environment, where ...

5

If you're interested in the theory behind Double Q-learning (not deep!), the reference paper would be Double Q-learning by Hado van Hasselt (2010). As for Double deep Q-learning (also called DDQN, short for Double Deep Q-networks), the reference paper would be Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning by Van Hasselt et al. (2016), as pointed out ...

5

In Q-learning (and in general value based reinforcement learning) we are typically interested in learning a Q-function, $Q(s, a)$. This is defined as $$Q(s, a) = \mathbb{E}_\pi\left[ G_t | S_t = s, A_t = a \right]\;.$$ For tabular Q-learning, where you have a finite state and action space - note that in practice even the spaces being finite might not be ...

4

The way you have described tends to be the common approach. There are of course other ways that you could do this e.g. using an exponential decay, or to only decay after a 'successful' episode, albeit in the latter case I imagine you would want to start with a smaller $\epsilon$ value and then decay by a larger amount.

4

The update form $\theta^{\prime} \leftarrow \tau \theta+(1-\tau) \theta^{\prime}$ (where $\theta'$ and $\theta$ represent the weights of the target network and the current network, respectively) does exist and is correct. It is called soft update and it has been used in the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) paper, which uses the concept of a target ...

4

Technical barriers: There should be at least these common sense big barriers: Trial-and-error technique makes the model hard to learn (too many), compared to ready-to-use supervised data Number of time-steps (which usually equals the number of actions of the agent in the trajectory) is large, thus brute-force exploration won't work as the number of trials ...

4

The answer is "it depends". Once you have arranged the actions into order, a key trait is whether the action value function has a simple enough shape that sampling from a Gaussian policy function would give consistent expected returns, enough that learning can occur. If the underlying "true" value function has a lot of high frequency ...

4

Yes, there are algorithms that try to predict the next state. Usually this will be a model based algorithm -- this is where the agent tries to make use of a model of the environment to help it learn. I'm not sure on the best resource to learn about this but my go-to recommendation is always the Sutton and Barto book. This paper introduces PlanGAN; the idea ...

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The difference between Vanilla Policy Gradient (VPG) with a baseline as Value function and Advantage Actor Critic (A2C) is very similar to the difference between Monte Carlo Control and SARSA: The value estimates used in updates for VPG are based on full sampled returns, calculated at the end of episodes. The value estimates used in updates for A2C are ...

3

From comments, you say there is no "outer" goal for picking an adversary other than scoring highly in an individual episode. You could potentially model the initial adversary choice as a partially separate Markov Decision Process (MDP), where choosing the opponent is a single-step episode with return equal to whatever reward the secondary MDP - ...

3

I've implemented this exact scenario before; your approach would most likely be successful, but I think it could be simplified. Therefore, when deciding on which action to pick, agent sets Q-values to 0 for all the illegal moves while normalizing the values of the rest. In DQN, the Q-values are used to find the best action. To determine the best action in ...

3

Deep Q Learning is a model-free algorithm. In the case of Go (and chess for that matter) the model of the game is very simple and deterministic. It's a perfect information game, so it's trivial to predict the next state given your current state and action (this is the model). They take advantage of this with MCTS to speed up training. I suppose Deep Q ...

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You should first read the introductory paper of Double DQN. https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.06461 Then, depending on what you would like to do, search for other relevant papers that use this method.

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Is this a sign that the algorithm diverged? It is a common sign of a problem with learning process. That includes divergence due to poor hyper-parameters, even just bad luck. But it can also point to a design/architecture problem. Other common causes of algorithm failing with a fixed action choice include: Neural network inputs not scaled before use. ...

3

DDPG is an off-policy algorithm simply because of the objective taking expectation with respect to some other distribution that we are not learning about, i.e. the deterministic policy gradient can be expressed as $$\nabla _{\theta^\mu} J \approx \mathbb{E}_{s_t \sim \rho^\beta} \left[ \nabla _{\theta^\mu} Q(s,a|\theta^Q) | s=s_t, a=\mu(s_t ; \theta ^\mu) \... 3 How would you train a reinforcement learning agent from raw pixels? For example, if you have 3 stacked images to sense motion, then how would you pass them to neural networks to output Q-learning values? A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) structure is a standard neural network architecture when working with 2D pixel input in reinforcement learning, and it ... 3 Depends on perspective. On one hand, you have an agent playing in an environment with another agent also evolving. This falls under the definition of Multi-Agent Learning, as can be seen with works such as Michael Bowling and Manuela Veloso. Multiagent learning using a variable learning rate. Artificial Intelligence, 136(2):215 – 250, 2002. Michael Bowling.... 3 The Ornstein Ulhenebck Process is defined as (in the continuous setting) :$$dX_t = -\beta(X_t - \alpha)dt + \sigma dW_t$$The analogue for this process in the discrete time case which I assume will be applicable in the RL case will be:$$X_{t+1} = X_t -\beta(X_t - \alpha) + \sigma \{W_{t+1}-W_t\}=X_{t+1} = (1 -\beta)X_t - \alpha + \sigma \{W_{t+1}-W_t\}...

3

First I will address the issue of Tabular methods. These do not use SGD at all. Although the updates are very similar to an SGD update there is no gradient here and so we are not using SGD. Many Tabular methods are proven to converge, for instance the paper by Chris Watkins titled "Q-Learning" introduces and proves that Q-learning converges. Also ...

3

As you say, the output of a $Q$ network is typically a value for all actions of the given state. Let us call this output $\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^{|\mathcal{A}|}$. To train your network using the squared bellman error you need first calculate the scalar target $y = r(s, a) + \max_a Q(s', a)$. Then, to train the network we take a vector $\mathbf{x'} = \... 3 The AlphaZero paper mentions an "evaluation" step that seems to deal with the the problem similar to yours: ... we evaluate each new neural network checkpoint against the current best network$f_{\theta_*}$before using it for data generation ... Each evaluation consists of 400 games ... If the new player wins by a margin of > 55% (to avoid ... 3 Would it be cheaper to have$N$neural networks with a single real-valued output, one for each of the$N$actions? I think the "No Free Lunch" theorem applies here, or something like it. Your proposed architecture would be an unusual choice in many cases, but might be more efficient in others. For instance, it could be more efficient in the ... 2 You do not output the batch of Q-values. Input frame stacking is needed to gain full observability of the environment. In your case the output would be 6 elements for your current frame. If$F$is a frame then you would stack 4 frames$[F_{k-3}, F_{k-2}, F_{k-1}, F_k]$and the output would be 6 Q-values for frame$F_k\$.

2

Yes, it is the state of the memory; this would mainly involve variables, since the code would be in ROM. Since it is only 128 bytes in size, the screen memory would also not be included in this. The idea is that all information relevant to the game is captured in these 128 bytes; they represent the state of the game world at any given time. Movements of the ...

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It is not so much the problem of using Reinforcement Learning to train the neural networks, it is the assumptions made about the data given to standard Neural Networks. They are not capable of handling strongly correlated data which is one of the motivations for introducing Recurrent Neural Networks, as they can handle this correlated data well.

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There are three problems Limited capacity Neural Network (explained by John) Non-stationary Target Non-stationary distribution Non-stationary Target In tabular Q-learning, when we update a Q-value, other Q-values in the table don't get affected by this. But in neural networks, one update to the weights aiming to alter one Q-value ends up affecting other Q-...

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