Improved exploration–exploitation trade-off through adaptive prioritized experience replay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Experience replay is an indispensable part of deep reinforcement learning algorithms that enables the agent to revisit and reuse its past and recent experiences to update the network parameters. In many baseline off-policy algorithms, such as deep Q-networks (DQN), transitions in the replay buffer are typically sampled uniformly. This uniform sampling is not optimal for accelerating the agent’s training towards learning the optimal policy. A more selective and prioritized approach to experience sampling can yield improved learning efficiency and performance. In this regard, this work is devoted to the design of a novel prioritizing strategy to adaptively adjust the sampling probabilities of stored transitions in the replay buffer. Unlike existing sampling methods, the proposed algorithm takes into consideration the exploration-exploitation trade-off (EET) to rank transitions, which is of utmost importance in learning an optimal policy. Specifically, this approach utilizes temporal difference and Bellman errors as criteria for sampling priorities. To maintain balance in EET throughout training, the weights associated with both criteria are dynamically adjusted when constructing the sampling priorities. Additionally, any bias introduced by this sample prioritization is mitigated through assigning importance-sampling weight to each transition in the buffer. The efficacy of this prioritization scheme is assessed through training the DQN algorithm across various OpenAI Gym environments. The results obtained underscore the significance and superiority of our proposed algorithm over state-of-the-art methods. This is evidenced by its accelerated learning pace, greater cumulative reward, and higher success rate. • A novel sample prioritization is proposed for deep Q-Networks. • Temporal difference and Bellman errors are employed to construct the priority score. • Weights of augmented errors into the priority score are adaptively updated. • The weighted priority balances the exploration-exploitation trade-off. • This score yields significant improvement over baselines across Gym environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".