In this post, we will investigate how easily we can train a Deep Q-Network (DQN) agent (Mnih et al., 2015) for Atari 2600 games using the Google reinforcement learning library Dopamine. While many RL libraries exist, this library is specifically designed with four essential features in mind:

• Easy experimentation
• Flexible development
• Compact and reliable
• Reproducible

_We believe these principles makes __Dopamine _one of the best RL learning environment available today. Additionally, we even got the library to work on Windows, which we think is quite a feat!

In my view, the visualization of any trained RL agent is an absolute must in reinforcement learning! Therefore, we will (of course) include this for our own trained agent at the very end!

We will go through all the pieces of code required (which is** minimal compared to other libraries**), but you can also find all scripts needed in the following Github repo.

1. Brief Introduction to Reinforcement Learning and Deep Q-Learning

The general premise of deep reinforcement learning is to

“derive efficient representations of the environment from high-dimensional sensory inputs, and use these to generalize past experience to new situations.”

• Mnih et al. (2015)

As stated earlier, we will implement the DQN model by Deepmind, which only uses raw pixels and game score as input. The raw pixels are processed using convolutional neural networks similar to image classification. The primary difference lies in the objective function, which for the DQN agent is called the optimal action-value function

where_ rₜ is the maximum sum of rewards at time t discounted by γ, obtained using a behavior policy π = P(a_∣_s)_ for each observation-action pair.

There are relatively many details to Deep Q-Learning, such as Experience Replay (Lin, 1993) and an _iterative update rule. _Thus, we refer the reader to the original paper for an excellent walk-through of the mathematical details.

One key benefit of DQN compared to previous approaches at the time (2015) was the ability to outperform existing methods for Atari 2600 games using the same set of hyperparameters and only pixel values and game score as input, clearly a tremendous achievement.

2. Installation

This post does not include instructions for installing Tensorflow, but we do want to stress that you can use both the CPU and GPU versions.

Nevertheless, assuming you are using Python 3.7.x, these are the libraries you need to install (which can all be installed via pip):

tensorflow-gpu=1.15   (or tensorflow==1.15  for CPU version)
cmake
dopamine-rl
atari-py
matplotlib
pygame
seaborn
pandas

#reinforcement-learning #q-learning #games #machine-learning #deep-learning #deep learning