Control with Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning: Learn a Better Policy.

Distributed approach is a very effective method to improve training efficiency of reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic distributed architecture for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, in which a PSO based network update mechanism is adopted to speed up learning an optimal policy besides using multiple agents for parallel training. In this mechanism, the update of neural network of each agent is not only according to the training result of itself, but also affected by the optimal neural network of all agents. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the proposed architecture is implemented on the Deep Q-Network algorithm (DQN) and the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm (DDPG) to train several typical control problems. The training results show that the proposed method is effective.