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Most Influential ICML 2016 Paper · 2026-03 edition

Benchmarking Deep Reinforcement Learning For Continuous Control

Yan Duan; Xi Chen; Rein Houthooft; John Schulman; Pieter Abbeel

Venue
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2016
Recognition
Most Influential ICML 2016 Paper (Rank No. 15)
Edition
2026-03
Impact factor
9
Certificate ID
d78a169b7146d3ea

Abstract

Recently, researchers have made significant progress combining the advances in deep learning for learning feature representations with reinforcement learning. Some notable examples include training agents to play Atari games based on raw pixel data and to acquire advanced manipulation skills using raw sensory inputs. However, it has been difficult to quantify progress in the domain of continuous control due to the lack of a commonly adopted benchmark. In this work, we present a benchmark suite of continuous control tasks, including classic tasks like cart-pole swing-up, tasks with very high state and action dimensionality such as 3D humanoid locomotion, tasks with partial observations, and tasks with hierarchical structure. We report novel findings based on the systematic evaluation of a range of implemented reinforcement learning algorithms. Both the benchmark and reference implementations are released at https://github.com/rllab/rllab in order to facilitate experimental reproducibility and to encourage adoption by other researchers.

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