Papers › Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning through Learning from Demonstrations in Minecraft

Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning through Learning from Demonstrations in Minecraft

12 Mar 2020arXiv:2003.06066archive 2025-07-28

Christian Scheller, Yanick Schraner, Manfred Vogel

Sample inefficiency of deep reinforcement learning methods is a major obstacle for their use in real-world applications. In this work, we show how human demonstrations can improve final performance of agents on the Minecraft minigame ObtainDiamond with only 8M frames of environment interaction. We propose a training procedure where policy networks are first trained on human data and later fine-tuned by reinforcement learning. Using a policy exploitation mechanism, experience replay and an additional loss against catastrophic forgetting, our best agent was able to achieve a mean score of 48. Our proposed solution placed 3rd in the NeurIPS MineRL Competition for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning.

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