A study of qualitative knowledge-based exploration for continuous deep reinforcement learning

Abstract

As an important method to solve sequential decisionmaking problems, reinforcement learning learns the policy of tasks through the interaction with environment. But it has difficulties scaling to largescale problems. One of the reasons is the exploration and exploitation dilemma which may lead to inefficient learning. We present an approach that addresses this shortcoming by introducing qualitative knowledge into reinforcement learning using cloud control systems to represent 'if-then' rules. We use it as the heuristics exploration strategy to guide the action selection in deep reinforcement learning. Empirical evaluation results show that our approach can make significant improvement in the learning process.