Learnable Behavior Control: Breaking Atari Human World Records via
  Sample-Efficient Behavior Selection
Jiajun Fan Yuzheng Zhuang Yuecheng Liu Jianye Hao Bin Wang Jiangcheng Zhu Hao Wang Shu-Tao Xia
The exploration problem is one of the main challenges in deep reinforcement
learning (RL). Recent promising works tried to handle the problem with
population-based methods, which collect samples with diverse behaviors derived
from a population of different exploratory policies. Adaptive policy selection
has been adopted for behavior control. However, the behavior selection space is
largely limited by the predefined policy population, which further limits
behavior diversity. In this paper, we propose a general framework called
Learnable Behavioral Control (LBC) to address the limitation, which a) enables
a significantly enlarged behavior selection space via formulating a hybrid
behavior mapping from all policies; b) constructs a unified learnable process
for behavior selection. We introduce LBC into distributed off-policy
actor-critic methods and achieve behavior control via optimizing the selection
of the behavior mappings with bandit-based meta-controllers. Our agents have
achieved 10077.52% mean human normalized score and surpassed 24 human world
records within 1B training frames in the Arcade Learning Environment, which
demonstrates our significant state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance without
degrading the sample efficiency.