Compute- and Memory-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Latent Experience Replay
Authors: Lili Chen, Kimin Lee, Aravind Srinivas, Pieter Abbeel
Keywords: reinforcement learning, deep learning, computational efficiency, memory efficiency
Abstract: Recent advances in off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) have led to impressive success in complex tasks from visual observations. Experience replay improves sample-efficiency by reusing experiences from the past, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) process high-dimensional inputs effectively. However, such techniques demand high memory and computational bandwidth. In this paper, we present Latent Vector Experience Replay (LeVER), a simple modification of existing off-policy RL methods, to address these computational and memory requirements without sacrificing the performance of RL agents. To reduce the computational overhead of gradient updates in CNNs, we freeze the lower layers of CNN encoders early in training due to early convergence of their parameters. Additionally, we reduce memory requirements by storing the low-dimensional latent vectors for experience replay instead of high-dimensional images, enabling an adaptive increase in the replay buffer capacity, a useful technique in constrained-memory settings. In our experiments, we show that LeVER does not degrade the performance of RL agents while significantly saving computation and memory across a diverse set of DeepMind Control environments and Atari games. Finally, we show that LeVER is useful for computation-efficient transfer learning in RL because lower layers of CNNs extract generalizable features, which can be used for different tasks and domains.