# Transforming Game Play: A Comparative Study of DCQN and DTQN Architectures in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10660/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Deep RL algorithms and representations, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 9 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [Deep RL algorithms and representations](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/deep-rl-algorithms-and-representations/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5602/) (2013)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06461/) (2015)
- [Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01345/) (2021)
- [Prioritized Experience Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05952/) (2015)
- [Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06581/) (2015)
- [Stabilizing Transformers for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06764/) (2019)
- [Revisiting the Arcade Learning Environment: Evaluation Protocols and Open Problems for General Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06009/) (2017)
- [Deep Transformer Q-Networks for Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01078/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this study, we investigate the performance of Deep Q-Networks utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformer architectures across three different Atari games. The advent of DQNs has significantly advanced Reinforcement Learning, enabling agents to directly learn optimal policies from high-dimensional sensory inputs from pixel or RAM data. While CNN-based DQNs have been extensively studied and deployed in various domains, Transformer-based DQNs are relatively unexplored. Our research aims to fill this gap by benchmarking the performance of both DCQNs and DTQNs across the Atari games Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Centipede. We find that in the 35-40 million parameter range, the DCQN outperforms the DTQN in speed across both ViT and Projection Architectures. We also find the DCQN outperforms the DTQN in all games except for Centipede.