Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Melee fighting game can be emulated on modern hardware allowing us to inspect internal memory states, such as character positions. We created an AI that avoids being hit by training using these internal memory states and outputting controller button presses. After training on a month's worth of Melee matches, our best agent learned to avoid the toughest AI built into the game for a full minute 74.6 of the time.
DeepMind Technologies has successfully learned to play Atari 2600 games using an emulator @cite_3 . DeepMind used a convolutional neural network combined with a Q-learning variant to learn to play games using just the games' pixel output. We plan to build on this success by focusing on a relatively newer game with more complex interactions. Instead of pixels, we look at the game's internal memory, including features such as characters' positions and velocities.
@cite_3
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Recently it has been shown that deep neural networks can learn to play Atari games by directly observing raw pixels of the playing area. We show how apprenticeship learning can be applied in this setting so that an agent can learn to perform a task (i.e. play a game) by observing the expert, without any explicitly provided knowledge of the game’s internal state or objectives. This paper introduces a novel method for learning how to play the most difficult Atari 2600 games from the Arcade Learning Environment using deep reinforcement learning. The proposed method, human checkpoint replay, consists in using checkpoints sampled from human gameplay as starting points for the learning process. This is meant to compensate for the difficulties of current exploration strategies, such as epsilon-greedy, to find successful control policies in games with sparse rewards. Like other deep reinforcement learning architectures, our model uses a convolutional neural network that receives only raw pixel inputs to estimate the state value function. We tested our method on Montezuma's Revenge and Private Eye, two of the most challenging games from the Atari platform. The results we obtained show a substantial improvement compared to previous learning approaches, as well as over a random player. We also propose a method for training deep reinforcement learning agents using human gameplay experience, which we call human experience replay. Motivated by vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) problems, in particular Atari games from the recent benchmark Aracade Learning Environment (ALE), we consider spatio-temporal prediction problems where future image-frames depend on control variables or actions as well as previous frames. While not composed of natural scenes, frames in Atari games are high-dimensional in size, can involve tens of objects with one or more objects being controlled by the actions directly and many other objects being influenced indirectly, can involve entry and departure of objects, and can involve deep partial observability. We propose and evaluate two deep neural network architectures that consist of encoding, action-conditional transformation, and decoding layers based on convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. Experimental results show that the proposed architectures are able to generate visually-realistic frames that are also useful for control over approximately 100-step action-conditional futures in some games. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to make and evaluate long-term predictions on high-dimensional video conditioned by control inputs. Motivated by vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) problems, in particular Atari games from the recent benchmark Aracade Learning Environment (ALE), we consider spatio-temporal prediction problems where future (image-)frames are dependent on control variables or actions as well as previous frames. While not composed of natural scenes, frames in Atari games are high-dimensional in size, can involve tens of objects with one or more objects being controlled by the actions directly and many other objects being influenced indirectly, can involve entry and departure of objects, and can involve deep partial observability. We propose and evaluate two deep neural network architectures that consist of encoding, action-conditional transformation, and decoding layers based on convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. Experimental results show that the proposed architectures are able to generate visually-realistic frames that are also useful for control over approximately 100-step action-conditional futures in some games. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to make and evaluate long-term predictions on high-dimensional video conditioned by control inputs. DeepMind's recent spectacular success in using deep convolutional neural nets and machine learning to build superhuman level agents --- e.g. for Atari games via deep Q-learning and for the game of Go via Reinforcement Learning --- raises many questions, including to what extent these methods will succeed in other domains. In this paper we consider DQL for the game of Hex: after supervised initialization, we use selfplay to train NeuroHex, an 11-layer CNN that plays Hex on the 13x13 board. Hex is the classic two-player alternate-turn stone placement game played on a rhombus of hexagonal cells in which the winner is whomever connects their two opposing sides. Despite the large action and state space, our system trains a Q-network capable of strong play with no search. After two weeks of Q-learning, NeuroHex achieves win-rates of 20.4 as first player and 2.1 as second player against a 1-second move version of MoHex, the current ICGA Olympiad Hex champion. Our data suggests further improvement might be possible with more training time. We present the first deep learning model to successfully learn control policies directly from high-dimensional sensory input using reinforcement learning. The model is a convolutional neural network, trained with a variant of Q-learning, whose input is raw pixels and whose output is a value function estimating future rewards. We apply our method to seven Atari 2600 games from the Arcade Learning Environment, with no adjustment of the architecture or learning algorithm. We find that it outperforms all previous approaches on six of the games and surpasses a human expert on three of them. A deep learning approach to reinforcement learning led to a general learner able to train on visual input to play a variety of arcade games at the human and superhuman levels. Its creators at the Google DeepMind's team called the approach: Deep Q-Network (DQN). We present an extension of DQN by "soft" and "hard" attention mechanisms. Tests of the proposed Deep Attention Recurrent Q-Network (DARQN) algorithm on multiple Atari 2600 games show level of performance superior to that of DQN. Moreover, built-in attention mechanisms allow a direct online monitoring of the training process by highlighting the regions of the game screen the agent is focusing on when making decisions. We introduce the first deep reinforcement learning agent that learns to beat Atari games with the aid of natural language instructions. The agent uses a multimodal embedding between environment observations and natural language to self-monitor progress through a list of English instructions, granting itself reward for completing instructions in addition to increasing the game score. Our agent significantly outperforms Deep Q-Networks (DQNs), Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) agents, and the best agents posted to OpenAI Gym on what is often considered the hardest Atari 2600 environment: Montezuma's Revenge. This research describes a study into the ability of a state of the art reinforcement learning algorithm to learn to perform multiple tasks. We demonstrate that the limitation of learning to performing two tasks can be mitigated with a competitive training method. We show that this approach results in improved generalization of the system when performing unforeseen tasks. The learning agent assessed is an altered version of the DeepMind deep Q–learner network (DQN), which has been demonstrated to outperform human players for a number of Atari 2600 games. The key findings of this paper is that there were significant degradations in performance when learning more than one game, and how this varies depends on both similarity and the comparative complexity of the two games. Deep Reinforcement Learning methods have achieved state of the art performance in learning control policies for the games in the Atari 2600 domain. One of the important parameters in the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) is the frame skip rate. It decides the granularity at which agents can control game play. A frame skip value of @math allows the agent to repeat a selected action @math number of times. The current state of the art architectures like Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Dueling Network Architectures (DuDQN) consist of a framework with a static frame skip rate, where the action output from the network is repeated for a fixed number of frames regardless of the current state. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, Dynamic Frame skip Deep Q-Network (DFDQN) which makes the frame skip rate a dynamic learnable parameter. This allows us to choose the number of times an action is to be repeated based on the current state. We show empirically that such a setting improves the performance on relatively harder games like Seaquest. The Atari 2600 games supported in the Arcade Learning Environment [, 2013] all feature a known initial (RAM) state and actions that have deterministic effects. Classical planners, however, cannot be used off-the-shelf as there is no compact PDDL-model of the games, and action effects and goals are not known a priori. Indeed, there are no explicit goals, and the planner must select actions on-line while interacting with a simulator that returns successor states and rewards. None of this precludes the use of blind lookahead algorithms for action selection like breadth-first search or Dijkstra's yet such methods are not effective over large state spaces. We thus turn to a different class of planning methods introduced recently that have been shown to be effective for solving large planning problems but which do not require prior knowledge of state transitions, costs (rewards) or goals. The empirical results over 54 Atari games show that the simplest such algorithm performs at the level of UCT, the state-of-the-art planning method in this domain, and suggest the potential of width-based methods for planning with simulators when factored, compact action models are not available. The recent advances in deep neural networks have led to effective vision-based reinforcement learning methods that have been employed to obtain human-level controllers in Atari 2600 games from pixel data. Atari 2600 games, however, do not resemble real-world tasks since they involve non-realistic 2D environments and the third-person perspective. Here, we propose a novel test-bed platform for reinforcement learning research from raw visual information which employs the first-person perspective in a semi-realistic 3D world. The software, called ViZDoom, is based on the classical first-person shooter video game, Doom. It allows developing bots that play the game using the screen buffer. ViZDoom is lightweight, fast, and highly customizable via a convenient mechanism of user scenarios. In the experimental part, we test the environment by trying to learn bots for two scenarios: a basic move-and-shoot task and a more complex maze-navigation problem. Using convolutional deep neural networks with Q-learning and experience replay, for both scenarios, we were able to train competent bots, which exhibit human-like behaviors. The results confirm the utility of ViZDoom as an AI research platform and imply that visual reinforcement learning in 3D realistic first-person perspective environments is feasible. The recent advances in deep neural networks have led to effective vision-based reinforcement learning methods that have been employed to obtain human-level controllers in Atari 2600 games from pixel data. Atari 2600 games, however, do not resemble real-world tasks since they involve non-realistic 2D environments and the third-person perspective. Here, we propose a novel test-bed platform for reinforcement learning research from raw visual information which employs the first-person perspective in a semi-realistic 3D world. The software, called ViZDoom, is based on the classical first-person shooter video game, Doom. It allows developing bots that play the game using the screen buffer. ViZDoom is lightweight, fast, and highly customizable via a convenient mechanism of user scenarios. In the experimental part, we test the environment by trying to learn bots for two scenarios: a basic move-and-shoot task and a more complex maze-navigation problem. Using convolutional deep neural networks with Q-learning and experience replay, for both scenarios, we were able to train competent bots, which exhibit human-like behaviors. The results confirm the utility of ViZDoom as an AI research platform and imply that visual reinforcement learning in 3D realistic first-person perspective environments is feasible. Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical in higher dimensions due to their reliance on enumerating the state-action space. Hence, exploration in complex domains is often performed with simple epsilon-greedy methods. In this paper, we consider the challenging Atari games domain, which requires processing raw pixel inputs and delayed rewards. We evaluate several more sophisticated exploration strategies, including Thompson sampling and Boltzman exploration, and propose a new exploration method based on assigning exploration bonuses from a concurrently learned model of the system dynamics. By parameterizing our learned model with a neural network, we are able to develop a scalable and efficient approach to exploration bonuses that can be applied to tasks with complex, high-dimensional state spaces. In the Atari domain, our method provides the most consistent improvement across a range of games that pose a major challenge for prior methods. In addition to raw game-scores, we also develop an AUC-100 metric for the Atari Learning domain to evaluate the impact of exploration on this benchmark. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved many recent successes, yet experiment turn-around time remains a key bottleneck in research and in practice. We investigate how to optimize existing deep RL algorithms for modern computers, specifically for a combination of CPUs and GPUs. We confirm that both policy gradient and Q-value learning algorithms can be adapted to learn using many parallel simulator instances. We further find it possible to train using batch sizes considerably larger than are standard, without negatively affecting sample complexity or final performance. We leverage these facts to build a unified framework for parallelization that dramatically hastens experiments in both classes of algorithm. All neural network computations use GPUs, accelerating both data collection and training. Our results include using an entire NVIDIA DGX-1 to learn successful strategies in Atari games in single-digit minutes, using both synchronous and asynchronous algorithms. In 2015, Google's Deepmind announced an advancement in creating an autonomous agent based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that could beat a professional player in a series of 49 Atari games. However, the current manifestation of DRL is still immature, and has significant drawbacks. One of DRL's imperfections is its lack of "exploration" during the training process, especially when working with high-dimensional problems. In this paper, we propose a mixed strategy approach that mimics behaviors of human when interacting with environment, and create a "thinking" agent that allows for more efficient exploration in the DRL training process. The simulation results based on the Breakout game show that our scheme achieves a higher probability of obtaining a maximum score than does the baseline DRL algorithm, i.e., the asynchronous advantage actor-critic method. The proposed scheme therefore can be applied effectively to solving a complicated task in a real-world application. Advances in deep reinforcement learning have allowed autonomous agents to perform well on Atari games, often outperforming humans, using only raw pixels to make their decisions. However, most of these games take place in 2D environments that are fully observable to the agent. In this paper, we present the first architecture to tackle 3D environments in first-person shooter games, that involve partially observable states. Typically, deep reinforcement learning methods only utilize visual input for training. We present a method to augment these models to exploit game feature information such as the presence of enemies or items, during the training phase. Our model is trained to simultaneously learn these features along with minimizing a Q-learning objective, which is shown to dramatically improve the training speed and performance of our agent. Our architecture is also modularized to allow different models to be independently trained for different phases of the game. We show that the proposed architecture substantially outperforms built-in AI agents of the game as well as humans in deathmatch scenarios. The combination of modern Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning approaches holds the promise of making significant progress on challenging applications requiring both rich perception and policy-selection. The Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) provides a set of Atari games that represent a useful benchmark set of such applications. A recent breakthrough in combining model-free reinforcement learning with deep learning, called DQN, achieves the best real-time agents thus far. Planning-based approaches achieve far higher scores than the best model-free approaches, but they exploit information that is not available to human players, and they are orders of magnitude slower than needed for real-time play. Our main goal in this work is to build a better real-time Atari game playing agent than DQN. The central idea is to use the slow planning-based agents to provide training data for a deep-learning architecture capable of real-time play. We proposed new agents based on this idea and show that they outperform DQN. Deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be a powerful framework for learning policies from complex high-dimensional sensory inputs to actions in complex tasks, such as the Atari domain. In this paper, we explore output representation modeling in the form of temporal abstraction to improve convergence and reliability of deep reinforcement learning approaches. We concentrate on macro-actions, and evaluate these on different Atari 2600 games, where we show that they yield significant improvements in learning speed. Additionally, we show that they can even achieve better scores than DQN. We offer analysis and explanation for both convergence and final results, revealing a problem deep RL approaches have with sparse reward signals. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have shown an impressive ability to learn complex control policies in high-dimensional environments. However, despite the ever-increasing performance on popular benchmarks such as the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), policies learned by deep RL algorithms often struggle to generalize when evaluated in remarkably similar environments. In this paper, we assess the generalization capabilities of DQN, one of the most traditional deep RL algorithms in the field. We provide evidence suggesting that DQN overspecializes to the training environment. We comprehensively evaluate the impact of traditional regularization methods, @math -regularization and dropout, and of reusing the learned representations to improve the generalization capabilities of DQN. We perform this study using different game modes of Atari 2600 games, a recently introduced modification for the ALE which supports slight variations of the Atari 2600 games traditionally used for benchmarking. Despite regularization being largely underutilized in deep RL, we show that it can, in fact, help DQN learn more general features. These features can then be reused and fine-tuned on similar tasks, considerably improving the sample efficiency of DQN.