Papers › Prioritized Experience Replay

Prioritized Experience Replay

18 Nov 2015arXiv:1511.05952archive 2025-07-28

Tom Schaul, John Quan, Ioannis Antonoglou, David Silver

Experience replay lets online reinforcement learning agents remember and reuse experiences from the past. In prior work, experience transitions were uniformly sampled from a replay memory. However, this approach simply replays transitions at the same frequency that they were originally experienced, regardless of their significance. In this paper we develop a framework for prioritizing experience, so as to replay important transitions more frequently, and therefore learn more efficiently. We use prioritized experience replay in Deep Q-Networks (DQN), a reinforcement learning algorithm that achieved human-level performance across many Atari games. DQN with prioritized experience replay achieves a new state-of-the-art, outperforming DQN with uniform replay on 41 out of 49 games.

Code

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Methods

Introduced by this paper: Prioritized Experience Replay

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