Investigating the Interplay of Prioritized Replay and Generalization

Experience replay is ubiquitous in reinforcement learning, to reuse past data and improve sample efficiency. Though a variety of smart sampling schemes have been introduced to improve performance, uniform sampling by far remains the most common approach. One exception is Prioritized Experience Replay (PER), where sampling is done proportionally to TD errors, inspired by the success of prioritized sweeping in dynamic programming. The original work on PER showed improvements in Atari, but follow-up results are mixed. In this paper, we investigate several variations on PER, to attempt to understand where and when PER may be useful. Our findings in prediction tasks reveal that while PER can improve value propagation in tabular settings, behavior is significantly different when combined with neural networks. Certain mitigations – like delaying target network updates to control generalization and using estimates of expected TD errors in PER to avoid chasing stochasticity – can avoid large spikes in error with PER and neural networks, but nonetheless generally do not outperform uniform replay. In control tasks, none of the prioritized variants consistently outperform uniform replay.