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Deep In-GPU Experience Replay

Artificial Intelligence 2018-01-11 v1

Abstract

Experience replay allows a reinforcement learning agent to train on samples from a large amount of the most recent experiences. A simple in-RAM experience replay stores these most recent experiences in a list in RAM, and then copies sampled batches to the GPU for training. I moved this list to the GPU, thus creating an in-GPU experience replay, and a training step that no longer has inputs copied from the CPU. I trained an agent to play Super Smash Bros. Melee, using internal game memory values as inputs and outputting controller button presses. A single state in Melee contains 27 floats, so the full experience replay fits on a single GPU. For a batch size of 128, the in-GPU experience replay trained twice as fast as the in-RAM experience replay. As far as I know, this is the first in-GPU implementation of experience replay. Finally, I note a few ideas for fitting the experience replay inside the GPU when the environment state requires more memory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.03138,
  title  = {Deep In-GPU Experience Replay},
  author = {Ben Parr},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.03138},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Source code (uses TensorFlow): https://github.com/bparr/gpu-experience-replay

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:40:55.113Z