Reinforcement Learning at the Hyperscale

Deep reinforcement learning is currently undergoing a revolution of scale, fuelled by jointly running the environment, data collection, and training loop on the GPU, which has resulted in orders of magnitude of speed-up for many tasks.

In this talk I start by presenting examples of our recent work which have been enabled by this revolution, spanning multi-agent RL, meta-learning, and environment discovery. I will end the talk by outlining failure modes of relying on GPU accelerated environments and possible paradigms for the community to collectively address them, ranging from promising research directions to novel evaluation protocols.