Evolutionary RL on Atari

August, 2020

The focus of my Master’s research was on evolutionary reinforcement learning. In particular, scaling neuroevolution to reinforcement learning problems with high-dimensional inputs (e.g. images). I was motivated by the fact that recent success in solving hard reinforcement learning problems can be largely credited to the use of deep neural networks, which can extract high-level features and learn compact state representations from high-dimensional inputs, such as images. However, the large networks required to learn both state representation and policy using this approach limit the effectiveness and benefits of neuroevolution methods that have proven effective at solving simpler problems in the past. We pursued a solution to this problem that separates state representation and policy learning and only apply neuroevolution to the latter.