EfficientZero: Mastering Atari Games with Limited Data (Machine Learning Research Paper Explained)

#efficientzero #muzero #atari

Reinforcement Learning methods are notoriously data-hungry. Notably, MuZero learns a latent world model just from scalar feedback of reward- and policy-predictions, and therefore relies on scale to perform well. However, most RL algorithms fail when presented with very little data. EfficientZero makes several improvements over MuZero that allows it to learn from astonishingly small amounts of data and outperform other methods by a large margin in the low-sample setting. This could be a staple algorithm for future RL research.

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Intro & Outline
2:30 - MuZero Recap
10:50 - EfficientZero improvements
14:15 - Self-Supervised consistency loss
17:50 - End-to-end prediction of the value prefix
20:40 - Model-based off-policy correction
25:45 - Experimental Results & Conclusion

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00210
Code: https://github.com/YeWR/EfficientZero
Note: code not there yet as of release of this video

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many applications. However, sample efficiency remains a key challenge, with prominent methods requiring millions (or even billions) of environment steps to train. Recently, there has been significant progress in sample efficient image-based RL algorithms; however, consistent human-level performance on the Atari game benchmark remains an elusive goal. We propose a sample efficient model-based visual RL algorithm built on MuZero, which we name EfficientZero. Our method achieves 190.4% mean human performance and 116.0% median performance on the Atari 100k benchmark with only two hours of real-time game experience and outperforms the state SAC in some tasks on the DMControl 100k benchmark. This is the first time an algorithm achieves super-human performance on Atari games with such little data. EfficientZero's performance is also close to DQN's performance at 200 million frames while we consume 500 times less data. EfficientZero's low sample complexity and high performance can bring RL closer to real-world applicability. We implement our algorithm in an easy-to-understand manner and it is available at this https URL. We hope it will accelerate the research of MCTS-based RL algorithms in the wider community.

Authors: Weirui Ye, Shaohuai Liu, Thanard Kurutach, Pieter Abbeel, Yang Gao

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