A Review for Deep Reinforcement Learning in Atari:Benchmarks, Challenges, and Solutions
This work addresses evaluation issues in deep reinforcement learning for researchers, offering a more rigorous benchmark to advance the field, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarks.
The paper critiques existing Atari benchmarks for overestimating RL agent performance and proposes a new benchmark based on human world records, revealing that current agents fall short of true superhuman levels and identifying four key challenges.
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.