Introduction

This package provides a Lasagne/Theano-based implementation of the deep Q-learning algorithm described in:

Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Alex Graves, Ioannis Antonoglou, Daan Wierstra, Martin Riedmiller

and

Mnih, Volodymyr, et al. "Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning." Nature 518.7540 (2015): 529-533.

Here is a video showing a trained network playing breakout (using an earlier version of the code):

http://youtu.be/SZ88F82KLX4

Dependencies

• A reasonably modern NVIDIA GPU
• OpenCV
• Theano (https://github.com/Theano/Theano)
• Lasagne (https://github.com/Lasagne/Lasagne
• Pylearn2 (https://github.com/lisa-lab/pylearn2)
• Arcade Learning Environment (https://github.com/mgbellemare/Arcade-Learning-Environment)

The script dep_script.sh can be used to install all dependencies under Ubuntu.

Running

Use the scripts run_nips.py or run_nature.py to start all the necessary processes:

$ ./run_nips.py --rom mortal_kombat.sfc --core snes

$ ./run_nature.py --rom mortal_kombat.sfc --core snes

The run_nips.py script uses parameters consistent with the original NIPS workshop paper. This code should take 2-4 days to complete. The run_nature.py script uses parameters consistent with the Nature paper. The final policies should be better, but it will take 6-10 days to finish training.

Either script will store output files in a folder prefixed with the name of the ROM. Pickled version of the network objects are stored after every epoch. The file results.csv will contain the testing output. You can plot the progress by executing plot_results.py:

$ python plot_results.py breakout_05-28-17-09_0p00025_0p99/results.csv

After training completes, you can watch the network play using the ale_run_watch.py script:

$ python ale_run_watch.py breakout_05-28-17-09_0p00025_0p99/network_file_99.pkl

Performance Tuning

Theano Configuration

Setting allow_gc=False in THEANO_FLAGS or in the .theanorc file significantly improves performance at the expense of a slight increase in memory usage on the GPU.

Getting Help

The deep Q-learning web-forum can be used for discussion and advice related to deep Q-learning in general and this package in particular.

See Also

• https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn

  This is the code DeepMind used for the Nature paper. The license only permits the code to be used for "evaluating and reviewing" the claims made in the paper.

• https://github.com/muupan/dqn-in-the-caffe

  Working Caffe-based implementation. (I haven't tried it, but there is a video of the agent playing Pong successfully.)

• https://github.com/kristjankorjus/Replicating-DeepMind

  Defunct? As far as I know, this package was never fully functional. The project is described here: http://robohub.org/artificial-general-intelligence-that-plays-atari-video-games-how-did-deepmind-do-it/

• https://github.com/brian473/neural_rl

  This is an almost-working implementation developed during Spring 2014 by my student Brian Brown. I haven't reused his code, but Brian and I worked together to puzzle through some of the blank areas of the original paper.