Training deep reinforcement learning agents complex behaviors in 3D virtual environments requires significant computational resources. This is especially true in environments with high degrees of aliasing, where many states share nearly identical visual features. Minecraft is an exemplar of such an environment. We hypothesize that interactive machine learning IML, wherein human teachers play a direct role in training through demonstrations, critique, or action advice, may alleviate agent susceptibility to aliasing. However, interactive machine learning is only practical when the number of human interactions is limited, requiring a balance between human teacher effort and agent performance. We conduct experiments with two reinforcement learning algorithms which enable human teachers to give action advice, Feedback Arbitration and Newtonian Action Advice, under visual aliasing conditions. To assess potential cognitive load per advice type, we vary the accuracy and frequency of various human action advice techniques. Training efficiency, robustness against infrequent and inaccurate advisor input, and sensitivity to aliasing are examined.
Reinforcement Learning is proven to be effective at learning agent control policies in 2D and 3D game environments including Atari @cite_19 , navigation in Minecraft environments @cite_22 @cite_13 @cite_2 , Doom @cite_16 , Quake II @cite_4 , DOTA 2, and StarCraft II. Most game environments are designed to have low perceptual aliasing to make it easier on human players even though the real world can often have high perceptual aliasing. 3D computer game environments provide a stepping stone to application of reinforcement learning in real world environments @cite_9 @cite_4 but sometimes overlook this aspect of the real world.
@cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_9 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_16 @cite_13
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Reinforcement learning is a type of unsupervised learning for sequential decision making. Q-learning is probably the best-understood reinforcement learning algorithm. In Q-learning, the agent learns a mapping from states and actions to their utilities. An important assumption of Q-learning is the Markovian environment assumption, meaning that any information needed to determine the optimal actions is reflected in the agent''s state representation. Consider an agent whose state representation is based solely on its immediate perceptual sensations. When its sensors are not able to make essential distinctions among world states, the Markov assumption is violated, causing a problem called perceptual aliasing. For example, when facing a closed box, an agent based on its current visual sensation cannot act optimally if the optimal action depends on the contents of the box. There are two basic approaches to addressing this problem -- using more sensors or using history to figure out the current world state. This paper studies three connectionist approaches which learn to use history to handle perceptual aliasing: the window-Q, recurrent-Q, and recurrent-model architectures. Empirical study of these architectures is presented. Their relative strengths and weaknesses are also discussed. Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve perceptually-specified goals using only a stream of observations and actions. Our agent simultaneously learns a goal-conditioned policy and a goal achievement reward function that measures how similar a state is to the goal state. This dual optimization leads to a co-operative game, giving rise to a learned reward function that reflects similarity in controllable aspects of the environment instead of distance in the space of observations. We demonstrate the efficacy of our agent to learn, in an unsupervised manner, to reach a diverse set of goals on three domains -- Atari, the DeepMind Control Suite and DeepMind Lab. This paper introduces SC2LE (StarCraft II Learning Environment), a reinforcement learning environment based on the StarCraft II game. This domain poses a new grand challenge for reinforcement learning, representing a more difficult class of problems than considered in most prior work. It is a multi-agent problem with multiple players interacting; there is imperfect information due to a partially observed map; it has a large action space involving the selection and control of hundreds of units; it has a large state space that must be observed solely from raw input feature planes; and it has delayed credit assignment requiring long-term strategies over thousands of steps. We describe the observation, action, and reward specification for the StarCraft II domain and provide an open source Python-based interface for communicating with the game engine. In addition to the main game maps, we provide a suite of mini-games focusing on different elements of StarCraft II gameplay. For the main game maps, we also provide an accompanying dataset of game replay data from human expert players. We give initial baseline results for neural networks trained from this data to predict game outcomes and player actions. Finally, we present initial baseline results for canonical deep reinforcement learning agents applied to the StarCraft II domain. On the mini-games, these agents learn to achieve a level of play that is comparable to a novice player. However, when trained on the main game, these agents are unable to make significant progress. Thus, SC2LE offers a new and challenging environment for exploring deep reinforcement learning algorithms and architectures. 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.