A Unified Experience Replay Framework for Spiking Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Abstract

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods have shown remarkable success in many applications, yet their high energy consumption limits their practicability. Recent studies incorporated energy-efficient Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to build Spiking DRL methods and lower energy consumption by setting a shorter simulation duration for SNNs to compute fewer gradients. However, these existing Spiking DRL methods fail to sample sufficient high-quality samples within a fixed-size replay buffer and perform poorly when the simulation duration is small, introducing the challenging tradeoff between energy consumption and model performance. Motivated by such observations, we develop a generic resilient experience replay method that can be seamlessly integrated into existing spiking DRL methods to effectively address the above tradeoff. Specifically, we allow the replay buffer to dynamically expand as the number of training samples increases, thereby accommodating more potentially valuable candidate samples for policy training. Meanwhile, we introduce an adaptive approach to manage the buffer size by determining when to shrink the replay buffer and removing redundant samples automatically. This strategy prevents the buffer from expanding unnecessarily, thereby mitigating the potential negative impact on model performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the performance of five state-of-the-art (SOTA) spiking DRL methods across various simulation durations in sixteen tasks, in terms of return, without compromising their energy efficiency.