English

Momentum in Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2020-04-01 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

We adapt the optimization's concept of momentum to reinforcement learning. Seeing the state-action value functions as an analog to the gradients in optimization, we interpret momentum as an average of consecutive qq-functions. We derive Momentum Value Iteration (MoVI), a variation of Value Iteration that incorporates this momentum idea. Our analysis shows that this allows MoVI to average errors over successive iterations. We show that the proposed approach can be readily extended to deep learning. Specifically, we propose a simple improvement on DQN based on MoVI, and experiment it on Atari games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.09322,
  title  = {Momentum in Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Nino Vieillard and Bruno Scherrer and Olivier Pietquin and Matthieu Geist},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.09322},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

AISTATS 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:49:46.108Z