Curiosity Driven Deep Reinforcement Learning

If reinforcement learning is to serve as a viable path to artificial general intelligence, it must learn to cope with environments with sparse or totally absent rewards. Most real life systems provided rewards that only occur after many time steps, leaving the agent with little information to build a successful policy on. Curiosity based reinforcement learning solves this problem by giving the agent an innate sense of curiosity about its world, enabling it to explore and learn successful policies for navigating the world.

In this advanced course on deep reinforcement learning, motivated students will learn how to implement cutting edge artificial intelligence research papers from scratch. This is a fast paced course for those that are experienced in coding up actor critic agents on their own. We’ll code up two papers in this course, using the popular PyTorch framework.

The first paper covers asynchronous methods for deep reinforcement learning; also known as the popular asynchronous advantage actor critic algorithm (A3C). Here students will discover a new framework for learning that doesn’t require a GPU. We will learn how to implement multithreading in Python and use that to train multiple actor critic agents in parallel. We will go beyond the basic implementation from the paper and implement a recent improvement to reinforcement learning known as generalized advantage estimation. We will test our agents in the Pong environment from the Open AI Gym’s Atari library, and achieve nearly world class performance in just a few hours.