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Stochastic Variance Reduction for Deep Q-learning

Machine Learning 2019-05-21 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved human-level performance on a variety of real-world applications. However, the current algorithms still suffer from poor gradient estimation with excessive variance, resulting in unstable training and poor sample efficiency. In our paper, we proposed an innovative optimization strategy by utilizing stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) techniques. With extensive experiments on Atari domain, our method outperforms the deep q-learning baselines on 18 out of 20 games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.08152,
  title  = {Stochastic Variance Reduction for Deep Q-learning},
  author = {Wei-Ye Zhao and Xi-Ya Guan and Yang Liu and Xiaoming Zhao and Jian Peng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.08152},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

this is the full paper version, its extended abstract has been published

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:13:33.538Z