A Review for Deep Reinforcement Learning in Atari:Benchmarks, Challenges, and Solutions

TL;DR

This paper reviews deep reinforcement learning in Atari, critiques current evaluation metrics, proposes a new benchmark based on human world records, and discusses challenges and solutions for surpassing human performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Atari benchmark based on human world records and analyzes the limitations of current evaluation criteria in RL research.

Findings

Current evaluation metrics underestimate human performance.

Proposed benchmark raises the bar for RL agents.

Identified four key challenges hindering superhuman performance.

Abstract

The Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) is proposed as an evaluation platform for empirically assessing the generality of agents across dozens of Atari 2600 games. ALE offers various challenging problems and has drawn significant attention from the deep reinforcement learning (RL) community. From Deep Q-Networks (DQN) to Agent57, RL agents seem to achieve superhuman performance in ALE. However, is this the case? In this paper, to explore this problem, we first review the current evaluation metrics in the Atari benchmarks and then reveal that the current evaluation criteria of achieving superhuman performance are inappropriate, which underestimated the human performance relative to what is possible. To handle those problems and promote the development of RL research, we propose a novel Atari benchmark based on human world records (HWR), which puts forward higher requirements for RL agents on both final performance and learning efficiency. Furthermore, we summarize the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in Atari benchmarks and provide benchmark results over new evaluation metrics based on human world records. We concluded that at least four open challenges hinder RL agents from achieving superhuman performance from those new benchmark results. Finally, we also discuss some promising ways to handle those problems.