Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Improving Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic With A More Intelligent Exploration Strategy, James B. Holliday
Improving Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic With A More Intelligent Exploration Strategy, James B. Holliday
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
We propose a simple and efficient modification to the Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C)
algorithm that improves training. In 2016 Google’s DeepMind set a new standard for state-of-theart
reinforcement learning performance with the introduction of the A3C algorithm. The goal of
this research is to show that A3C can be improved by the use of a new novel exploration strategy we
call “Follow then Forage Exploration” (FFE). FFE forces the agents to follow the best known path
at the beginning of a training episode and then later in the episode the agent is forced to “forage”
and explores randomly. In …