Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On

A3C – gradients parallelism

The next approach that we will consider to parallelize A2C implementation will have several child processes, but instead of feeding training data to the central training loop, they will calculate the gradients using their local training data and send those gradients to the central master process. This process is responsible for combining those gradients together (which is basically just summing them) and performing an SGD update on the shared network.

The difference might look minor, but this approach is much more scalable, especially if you have several powerful nodes with multiple GPUs connected with the network. In this case, the central process in the data-parallel model quickly becomes a bottleneck, as the loss ...