Paper Annotations Slow Paper Post Obstacle Tower Series
Why I Read This
- I saw it on Twitter.
- I enjoy participating in reinforcement learning competitions.
Short Summary
- Reinforcement learning (RL) has now reached superhuman level on most environments of Arcade Learning Environment, so we need a new benchmark.
- Obstacle Tower environment is a new environment, with challenges in generalization, vision, planning, and control.
- Agents that use Hierarchical RL, Intrinsic Motivation, Meta-Learning or Model-based methods will probably perform better than pure baseline algorithms such as Rainbow or PPO.
- The Obstacle Tower Challenge will begin on February 11th.
Thoughts
- The Obstacle Tower environment can perhaps be better summarized as a 3D stochastic version of Montezuma’s Revenge with an easy version of Sokoban.
- The environment is perhaps too difficult: it requires an agent with good exploration and planning, paired with a good convolutional neural network (CNN).
Accompanying Resources
If you want to learn more about the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), the predecessor of Obstacle Tower environment, check these links.
- Arcade Learning Environment (GitHub Repo)
- The Arcade Learning Environment: An Evaluation Platform for General Agents (arXiv Paper)
- Revisiting the Arcade Learning Environment: Evaluation Protocols and Open Problems for General Agents (arXiv Paper)
If you want to learn more about the environment, check these links.