Bellemare, Marc, Sriram Srinivasan, Georg Ostrovski, Tom Schaul, David Saxton, and Remi Munos. “Unifying count-based exploration and intrinsic motivation.” Advances in neural information processing systems 29 (2016): 1471-1479.
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We consider an agent’s uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across states. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration from the intrinsic motivation literature, we use density models to measure uncertainty, and propose a novel algorithm for deriving a pseudo-count from an arbitrary density model. This technique enables us to generalize count-based exploration algorithms to the non-tabular case. We apply our ideas to Atari 2600 games, providing sensible pseudo-counts from raw pixels. We transform these pseudo-counts into exploration bonuses and obtain significantly improved exploration in a number of hard games, including the infamously difficult Montezuma’s Revenge.