Papers › Improved robustness of reinforcement learning policies upon conversion to spiking...

Improved robustness of reinforcement learning policies upon conversion to spiking neuronal network platforms applied to ATARI games

26 Mar 2019arXiv:1903.11012archive 2025-07-28

Devdhar Patel, Hananel Hazan, Daniel J. Saunders, Hava Siegelmann, Robert Kozma

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) demonstrates excellent performance on tasks that can be solved by trained policy. It plays a dominant role among cutting-edge machine learning approaches using multi-layer Neural networks (NNs). At the same time, Deep RL suffers from high sensitivity to noisy, incomplete, and misleading input data. Following biological intuition, we involve Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to address some deficiencies of deep RL solutions. Previous studies in image classification domain demonstrated that standard NNs (with ReLU nonlinearity) trained using supervised learning can be converted to SNNs with negligible deterioration in performance. In this paper, we extend those conversion results to the domain of Q-Learning NNs trained using RL. We provide a proof of principle of the conversion of standard NN to SNN. In addition, we show that the SNN has improved robustness to occlusion in the input image. Finally, we introduce results with converting full-scale Deep Q-network to SNN, paving the way for future research to robust Deep RL applications.

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Hananel-Hazan/bindsnet officialmentioned in paperpytorchAGPL-3.0 report
pereirarodrigo/project_spike mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
pereirarodrigo/spike mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Atari GamesDeep Reinforcement LearningImage ClassificationQ-LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)image-classification

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Q-LearningReLU

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