Papers › Noisy Networks for Exploration

Noisy Networks for Exploration

30 Jun 2017ICLR 2018 1arXiv:1706.10295archive 2025-07-28

Meire Fortunato, Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar, Bilal Piot, Jacob Menick, Ian Osband, Alex Graves, Vlad Mnih, Remi Munos, Demis Hassabis, Olivier Pietquin, Charles Blundell, Shane Legg

We introduce NoisyNet, a deep reinforcement learning agent with parametric noise added to its weights, and show that the induced stochasticity of the agent's policy can be used to aid efficient exploration. The parameters of the noise are learned with gradient descent along with the remaining network weights. NoisyNet is straightforward to implement and adds little computational overhead. We find that replacing the conventional exploration heuristics for A3C, DQN and dueling agents (entropy reward and ϵ-greedy respectively) with NoisyNet yields substantially higher scores for a wide range of Atari games, in some cases advancing the agent from sub to super-human performance.

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15 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

BY571/DQN-Atari-Agents mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Curt-Park/rainbow-is-all-you-need mentioned on GitHubMIT report
Kaixhin/NoisyNet-A3C mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
LilTwo/DRL-using-PyTorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
MOVzeroOne/DQN mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
YanSong97/Master-thesis mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
behzadanksu/rl-attack mentioned on GitHubtf report
behzadanksu/rlattack-dev mentioned on GitHubtf report
chainer/chainerrl mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
hw9603/DQfD-PyTorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
mindspore-courses/Rainbow-MindSpore mentioned on GitHubmindspore report
seungjaeryanlee/rldb mentioned on GitHub report
thomashirtz/noisy-networks mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Atari GamesDeep Reinforcement LearningEfficient ExplorationReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Atari Games Atari 2600 Alien NoisyNet-Dueling Score 5778 #15 of 49 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Amidar NoisyNet-Dueling Score 3537 #5 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Assault NoisyNet-Dueling Score 11231 #16 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Asterix NoisyNet-Dueling Score 28350 #22 of 49 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Asteroids NoisyNet-Dueling Score 86700 #10 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Atlantis NoisyNet-Dueling Score 972175 #14 of 42 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Bank Heist NoisyNet-Dueling Score 1318 #11 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Battle Zone NoisyNet-Dueling Score 52262 #12 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Beam Rider NoisyNet-Dueling Score 23134 #19 of 49 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Berzerk NoisyNet-Dueling Score 1896 #17 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Boxing NoisyNet-Dueling Score 100 #3 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Breakout NoisyNet-Dueling Score 263 #45 of 58 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Centipede NoisyNet-Dueling Score 7596 #24 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Chopper Command NoisyNet-Dueling Score 11477 #18 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Crazy Climber NoisyNet-Dueling Score 171171 #12 of 49 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Defender NoisyNet-Dueling Score 42253 #15 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Demon Attack NoisyNet-Dueling Score 69311 #27 of 46 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Double Dunk NoisyNet-Dueling Score 1 #20 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Enduro NoisyNet-Dueling Score 2013 #20 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Fishing Derby NoisyNet-Dueling Score 57 #10 of 44 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Freeway NoisyNet-Dueling Score 34 #3 of 59 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Frostbite NoisyNet-Dueling Score 2923 #26 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Gopher NoisyNet-Dueling Score 38909 #17 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Gravitar NoisyNet-Dueling Score 2209 #16 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 HERO NoisyNet-Dueling Score 31533 #13 of 44 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Ice Hockey NoisyNet-Dueling Score 3 #15 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Kangaroo NoisyNet-Dueling Score 15227 #6 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Krull NoisyNet-Dueling Score 10754 #14 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Kung-Fu Master NoisyNet-Dueling Score 41672 #20 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Montezuma's Revenge NoisyNet-Dueling Score 57 #31 of 50 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Ms. Pacman NoisyNet-Dueling Score 5546 #19 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Name This Game NoisyNet-Dueling Score 12211 #22 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Phoenix NoisyNet-Dueling Score 10379 #19 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Pitfall! NoisyNet-Dueling Score 0 #8 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Pong NoisyNet-Dueling Score 21 #6 of 52 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Private Eye NoisyNet-Dueling Score 279 #31 of 52 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Q*Bert NoisyNet-Dueling Score 27121 #15 of 57 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Road Runner NoisyNet-Dueling Score 234352 #8 of 44 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Robotank NoisyNet-Dueling Score 64 #18 of 42 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Seaquest NoisyNet-Dueling Score 16754 #17 of 57 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Skiing NoisyNet-Dueling Score -7550 #8 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Solaris NoisyNet-Dueling Score 6522 #12 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Space Invaders NoisyNet-Dueling Score 5909 #21 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Star Gunner NoisyNet-Dueling Score 75867 #20 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Surround NoisyNet-Dueling Score 10 #1 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Tennis NoisyNet-Dueling Score 0 #26 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Time Pilot NoisyNet-Dueling Score 17301 #14 of 44 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Tutankham NoisyNet-Dueling Score 269 #14 of 44 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Up and Down NoisyNet-Dueling Score 61326 #20 of 44 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Venture NoisyNet-Dueling Score 815 #19 of 55 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Video Pinball NoisyNet-Dueling Score 870954 #7 of 42 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Wizard of Wor NoisyNet-Dueling Score 9149 #23 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Yars Revenge NoisyNet-Dueling Score 86101 #10 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Zaxxon NoisyNet-Dueling Score 14874 #17 of 41 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: Noisy Linear Layer, NoisyNet-A3C, NoisyNet-DQN, NoisyNet-Dueling

A3CConvolutionDQNDense ConnectionsDouble Q-learningDueling NetworkEntropy RegularizationNoisy Linear LayerNoisyNet-A3CNoisyNet-DQNNoisyNet-DuelingQ-LearningSoftmax

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