Papers › Reinforcement Learning through Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic on a GPU

Reinforcement Learning through Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic on a GPU

18 Nov 2016arXiv:1611.06256archive 2025-07-28

Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Iuri Frosio, Stephen Tyree, Jason Clemons, Jan Kautz

We introduce a hybrid CPU/GPU version of the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm, currently the state-of-the-art method in reinforcement learning for various gaming tasks. We analyze its computational traits and concentrate on aspects critical to leveraging the GPU's computational power. We introduce a system of queues and a dynamic scheduling strategy, potentially helpful for other asynchronous algorithms as well. Our hybrid CPU/GPU version of A3C, based on TensorFlow, achieves a significant speed up compared to a CPU implementation; we make it publicly available to other researchers at https://github.com/NVlabs/GA3C .

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NVlabs/GA3C officialmentioned in papertfBSD-3-Clause report
Sheepsody/Batched-Impala-PyTorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
nicoladainese96/SC2-RL mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Reinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Schedulingreinforcement-learning

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A3CConvolutionDense ConnectionsEntropy RegularizationSoftmax

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