Quantum reinforcement learning: Comparing quantum annealing and gate-based quantum computing with classical deep reinforcement learning

Abstract

In this paper, we present implementations of an annealing-based and a gate-based quantum computing approach for finding the optimal policy to traverse a grid and compare them to a classical deep reinforcement learning approach. We extended these three approaches by allowing for stochastic actions instead of deterministic actions and by introducing a new learning technique called curriculum learning. With curriculum learning, we gradually increase the complexity of the environment and we find that it has a positive effect on the expected reward of a traversal. We see that the number of training steps needed for the two quantum approaches is lower than that needed for the classical approach.