a) A visualization of the learned value function on the game Breakout. At time points 1 and 2, the state value is predicted to be ~17 and the agent is clearing the bricks at the lowest level. Each of the peaks in the value function curve corresponds to a reward obtained by clearing a brick. At time point 3, the agent is about to break through to the top level of bricks and the value increases to ~21 in anticipation of breaking out and clearing a large set of bricks. At point 4, the value is above 23 and the agent has broken through. After this point, the ball will bounce at the upper part of the bricks clearing many of them by itself.
b) A visualization of the learned action-value function on the game Pong. At time point 1, the ball is moving towards the paddle controlled by the agent on the right side of the screen and the values of all actions are around 0.7, reflecting the expected value of this state based on previous experience. At time point 2, the agent starts moving the paddle towards the ball and the value of the ‘up’ action stays high while the value of the ‘down’ action falls to −0.9. This reflects the fact that pressing ‘down’ would lead to the agent losing the ball and incurring a reward of −1. At time point 3, the agent hits the ball by pressing ‘up’ and the expected reward keeps increasing until time point 4, when the ball reaches the left edge of the screen and the value of all actions reflects that the agent is about to receive a reward of 1. Note, the dashed line shows the past trajectory of the ball purely for illustrative purposes (that is, not shown during the game).

Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
by Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Demis Hassabis, et al.
Nature 518,529–533 (26 February 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14236

The theory of reinforcement learning provides a normative account, deeply rooted in psychological and neuroscientific perspectives on animal behaviour, of how agents may optimize their control of an environment. To use reinforcement learning successfully in situations approaching real-world complexity, however, agents are confronted with a difficult task: they must derive efficient representations of the environment from high-dimensional sensory inputs, and use these to generalize past experience to new situations. Remarkably, humans and other animals seem to solve this problem through a harmonious combination of reinforcement learning and hierarchical sensory processing systems, the former evidenced by a wealth of neural data revealing notable parallels between the phasic signals emitted by dopaminergic neurons and temporal difference reinforcement learning algorithms. While reinforcement learning agents have achieved some successes in a variety of domains, their applicability has previously been limited to domains in which useful features can be handcrafted, or to domains with fully observed, low-dimensional state spaces. Here we use recent advances in training deep neural networks to develop a novel artificial agent, termed a deep Q-network, that can learn successful policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs using end-to-end reinforcement learning. We tested this agent on the challenging domain of classic Atari 2600 games. We demonstrate that the deep Q-network agent, receiving only the pixels and the game score as inputs, was able to surpass the performance of all previous algorithms and achieve a level comparable to that of a professional human games tester across a set of 49 games, using the same algorithm, network architecture and hyperparameters. This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.