# Forgetful Experience Replay in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning from Demonstrations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09939/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11795/) (2022)
- [Distilling Reinforcement Learning Tricks for Video Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00703/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Currently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) shows impressive results in complex gaming and robotic environments. Often these results are achieved at the expense of huge computational costs and require an incredible number of episodes of interaction between the agent and the environment. There are two main approaches to improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning methods - using hierarchical methods and expert demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a combination of these approaches that allow the agent to use low-quality demonstrations in complex vision-based environments with multiple related goals. Our forgetful experience replay (ForgER) algorithm effectively handles errors in expert data and reduces quality losses when adapting the action space and states representation to the agent's capabilities. Our proposed goal-oriented structuring of replay buffer allows the agent to automatically highlight sub-goals for solving complex hierarchical tasks in demonstrations. Our method is universal and can be integrated into various off-policy methods. It surpasses all known existing state-of-the-art RL methods using expert demonstrations on various model environments. The solution based on our algorithm beats all the solutions for the famous MineRL competition and allows the agent to mine a diamond in the Minecraft environment.