Title
High-Throughput Synchronous Deep RL
Abstract
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is computationally demanding and requires processing of many data points. Synchronous methods enjoy training stability while having lower data throughput. In contrast, asynchronous methods achieve high throughput but suffer from stability issues and lower sample efficiency due to `stale policies.' To combine the advantages of both methods we propose High-Throughput Synchronous Deep Reinforcement Learning (HTS-RL). In HTS-RL, we perform learning and rollouts concurrently, devise a system design which avoids `stale policies' and ensure that actors interact with environment replicas in an asynchronous manner while maintaining full determinism. We evaluate our approach on Atari games and the Google Research Football environment. Compared to synchronous baselines, HTS-RL is 2-6$\times$ faster. Compared to state-of-the-art asynchronous methods, HTS-RL has competitive throughput and consistently achieves higher average episode rewards.
Year
Venue
DocType
2020
NIPS 2020
Conference
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
33
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Iou-Jen Liu1122.64
Raymond Yeh2676.83
Alexander G. Schwing369651.78