Self-Adaptive Priority Correction for Prioritized Experience Replay

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for general artificial intelligence. However, most DRL methods suffer from the problem of data inefficiency. To alleviate this problem, DeepMind proposed Prioritized Experience Replay (PER). Though PER improves data utilization, the prioritie...

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Main Authors: Hongjie Zhang, Cheng Qu, Jindou Zhang, Jing Li
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/19/6925
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author Hongjie Zhang
Cheng Qu
Jindou Zhang
Jing Li
author_facet Hongjie Zhang
Cheng Qu
Jindou Zhang
Jing Li
author_sort Hongjie Zhang
collection DOAJ
description Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for general artificial intelligence. However, most DRL methods suffer from the problem of data inefficiency. To alleviate this problem, DeepMind proposed Prioritized Experience Replay (PER). Though PER improves data utilization, the priorities of most samples in its Experience Memory (EM) are out of date, as only the priorities of a small part of the data are updated while the Q network parameters are updated. Consequently, the difference between storage and real priority distributions gradually increases, which will introduce bias into the gradients of Deep Q-Learning (DQL) and make the DQL update toward a non-ideal direction. In this work, we propose a novel self-adaptive priority correction algorithm named Importance-PER (Imp-PER) to fix the update deviation. Specifically, we predict the sum of real Temporal-Difference error (TD-error) of all data in EM. Data are corrected by an importance weight, which is estimated by the predicted sum and the real TD-error calculated by the latest agent. To control the unbounded importance weight, we use truncated importance sampling with a self-adaptive truncation threshold. The conducted experiments on various games of Atari 2600 with Double Deep Q-Network and MuJoCo with Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient demonstrate that Imp-PER improves the data utilization and final policy quality on discrete states and continuous states tasks without increasing the computational cost.
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spelling doaj.art-51c612d6d5034a94acb46d121a98b3f02023-11-20T15:56:29ZengMDPI AGApplied Sciences2076-34172020-10-011019692510.3390/app10196925Self-Adaptive Priority Correction for Prioritized Experience ReplayHongjie Zhang0Cheng Qu1Jindou Zhang2Jing Li3School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, ChinaDeep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for general artificial intelligence. However, most DRL methods suffer from the problem of data inefficiency. To alleviate this problem, DeepMind proposed Prioritized Experience Replay (PER). Though PER improves data utilization, the priorities of most samples in its Experience Memory (EM) are out of date, as only the priorities of a small part of the data are updated while the Q network parameters are updated. Consequently, the difference between storage and real priority distributions gradually increases, which will introduce bias into the gradients of Deep Q-Learning (DQL) and make the DQL update toward a non-ideal direction. In this work, we propose a novel self-adaptive priority correction algorithm named Importance-PER (Imp-PER) to fix the update deviation. Specifically, we predict the sum of real Temporal-Difference error (TD-error) of all data in EM. Data are corrected by an importance weight, which is estimated by the predicted sum and the real TD-error calculated by the latest agent. To control the unbounded importance weight, we use truncated importance sampling with a self-adaptive truncation threshold. The conducted experiments on various games of Atari 2600 with Double Deep Q-Network and MuJoCo with Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient demonstrate that Imp-PER improves the data utilization and final policy quality on discrete states and continuous states tasks without increasing the computational cost.https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/19/6925deep reinforcement learningexperience replayimportance samplingDDQNDDPG
spellingShingle Hongjie Zhang
Cheng Qu
Jindou Zhang
Jing Li
Self-Adaptive Priority Correction for Prioritized Experience Replay
Applied Sciences
deep reinforcement learning
experience replay
importance sampling
DDQN
DDPG
title Self-Adaptive Priority Correction for Prioritized Experience Replay
title_full Self-Adaptive Priority Correction for Prioritized Experience Replay
title_fullStr Self-Adaptive Priority Correction for Prioritized Experience Replay
title_full_unstemmed Self-Adaptive Priority Correction for Prioritized Experience Replay
title_short Self-Adaptive Priority Correction for Prioritized Experience Replay
title_sort self adaptive priority correction for prioritized experience replay
topic deep reinforcement learning
experience replay
importance sampling
DDQN
DDPG
url https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/19/6925
work_keys_str_mv AT hongjiezhang selfadaptiveprioritycorrectionforprioritizedexperiencereplay
AT chengqu selfadaptiveprioritycorrectionforprioritizedexperiencereplay
AT jindouzhang selfadaptiveprioritycorrectionforprioritizedexperiencereplay
AT jingli selfadaptiveprioritycorrectionforprioritizedexperiencereplay