title: Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning.
abstract: The theory of reinforcement learning provides a normative account, deeply rooted in psychological and neuroscientific perspectives on animal behaviour, of how agents may optimize their control of an environment. To use reinforcement learning successfully in situations approaching real-world complexity, however, agents are confronted with a difficult task: they must derive efficient representations of the environment from high-dimensional sensory inputs, and use these to generalize past experience to new situations. Remarkably, humans and other animals seem to solve this problem through a harmonious combination of reinforcement learning and hierarchical sensory processing systems, the former evidenced by a wealth of neural data revealing notable parallels between the phasic signals emitted by dopaminergic neurons and temporal difference reinforcement learning algorithms. While reinforcement learning agents have achieved some successes in a variety of domains, their applicability has previously been limited to domains in which useful features can be handcrafted, or to domains with fully observed, low-dimensional state spaces. Here we use recent advances in training deep neural networks to develop a novel artificial agent, termed a deep Q-network, that can learn successful policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs using end-to-end reinforcement learning. We tested this agent on the challenging domain of classic Atari 2600 games. We demonstrate that the deep Q-network agent, receiving only the pixels and the game score as inputs, was able to surpass the performance of all previous algorithms and achieve a level comparable to that of a professional human games tester across a set of 49 games, using the same algorithm, network architecture and hyperparameters. This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Volodymyr
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Mnih
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Koray
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kavukcuoglu
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Silver
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Andrei A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Rusu
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Joel
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Veness
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Marc G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Bellemare
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Graves
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Riedmiller
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Andreas K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Fidjeland
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Georg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ostrovski
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Stig
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Petersen
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Charles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Beattie
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Amir
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sadik
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Ioannis
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Antonoglou
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Helen
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: King
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Dharshan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kumaran
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Daan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wierstra
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Shane
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Legg
authors.affiliation: Google DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
authors.forename: Demis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hassabis
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012201:Reward; D018910:Video Games