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arXiv · 1810.02927

Scaling All-Goals Updates in Reinforcement Learning Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Fabio Pardo·Vitaly Levdik·Petar Kormushev
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Abstract

Being able to reach any desired location in the environment can be a valuable asset for an agent. Learning a policy to navigate between all pairs of states individually is often not feasible. An all-goals updating algorithm uses each transition to learn Q-values towards all goals simultaneously and off-policy. However the expensive numerous updates in parallel limited the approach to small tabular cases so far. To tackle this problem we propose to use convolutional network architectures to generate Q-values and updates for a large number of goals at once. We demonstrate the accuracy and generalization qualities of the proposed method on randomly generated mazes and Sokoban puzzles. In the case of on-screen goal coordinates the resulting mapping from frames to distance-maps directly informs the agent about which places are reachable and in how many steps. As an example of application we show that replacing the random actions in epsilon-greedy exploration by several actions towards feasible goals generates better exploratory trajectories on Montezuma's Revenge and Super Mario All-Stars games.

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BibTeXRIS

Fabio Pardo, Vitaly Levdik, Petar Kormushev. 2020-02-04. Scaling All-Goals Updates in Reinforcement Learning Using Convolutional Neural Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02927

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