Forgetful Experience Replay in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning from Demonstrations

Currently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) shows impressive results in complex gaming and robotic environments. Often these results are achieved at the expense of huge computational costs and require an incredible number of episodes of interaction between the agent and the environment. There are two main approaches to improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning methods - using hierarchical methods and expert demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a combination of these approaches that allow the agent to use low-quality demonstrations in complex vision-based environments with multiple related goals. Our forgetful experience replay (ForgER) algorithm effectively handles errors in expert data and reduces quality losses when adapting the action space and states representation to the agent's capabilities. Our proposed goal-oriented structuring of replay buffer allows the agent to automatically highlight sub-goals for solving complex hierarchical tasks in demonstrations. Our method is universal and can be integrated into various off-policy methods. It surpasses all known existing state-of-the-art RL methods using expert demonstrations on various model environments. The solution based on our algorithm beats all the solutions for the famous MineRL competition and allows the agent to mine a diamond in the Minecraft environment.

Hierarchical Deep Q-Network from Imperfect Demonstrations in Minecraft

We present hierarchical Deep Q-Network with Forgetting (HDQF) that took first place in MineRL competition. HDQF works on imperfect demonstrations utilize hierarchical structure of expert trajectories extracting effective sequence of meta-actions and subgoals. We introduce structured task dependent replay buffer and forgetting technique that allow the HDQF agent to gradually erase poor-quality expert data from the buffer. In this paper we present the details of the HDQF algorithm and give the experimental results in Minecraft domain.